The aim of the research is to identify the features of the functioning of adjectives in Russian and English that contribute to expressing the semantics of precedence within an utterance. The paper provides an analysis of English and Russian adjectives that realize the semantics of precedence. The study highlights a group of adjectives with the temporal semantics that function as adverbial modifiers expressing precedence at the level of deep structure, while at the level of surface structure, they serve the syntactic function of attributive modifiers. The scientific novelty lies in identifying the spectrum of English and Russian adjectives as non-verbal means of expressing precedence actualizing the temporal semantics of an utterance. It is found that in both languages, adjectives explicitly express the semantics of precedence and at the level of deep structure correspond to adverbs functioning as temporal modifiers. The most frequent adjective in English is ‘previous’, in Russian it is ‘предыдущий’ (previous). Adjectives like ‘former’, ‘бывший’ are characterized by their combination with personal names and organizations to represent their preceding state or position. Allomorphism is manifested in the presence of adjectives with distinctive features expressing precedence.