A corpus-based study of adjectivizations in English

Abstract

This study investigated the diachronic and synchronic distributions of the two types of adjectivization in English: nominal group adjectivization and participle adjectivization. The research based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) finds that -ion nouns will be adjectivized to the classifier use, then to the epithet use in nominal groups and finally to the predicative use, and that participles have the potential to be adjectivized to the epithet use and then to the predicative use. However, not all the modifier uses of the nominal group adjectivizations will shift to the predicative uses because nominal group adjectivizations typically function as classifier in nominal groups. The research based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) finds that nominal group adjectivizations tend to occur in formal academic texts because nominal group adjectivizations increase the lexical density whereas participle adjectivizations are oppositely distributed because participle adjectivizations function mostly as interpersonal epithet and the speaker involvement is not a characteristic feature of academic writing. The reason why the classifier uses of the nominal group adjectivizations do not have priority over the predicative uses in the hard science texts is that noun classifiers prefer to occur more in the hard science texts than in the soft science texts.