Abstract
Abstract This article aims to conduct a corpus-based study of the diachronic and synchronic distributions of a special type of participle adjectivization, the ADJ-looking adjectivization. The study based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) finds that this process of adjectivization consists of two phases: (1) The downward rank-shift from the look ADJ construction to the ADJ looking adjectivization is a process of metaphorization; (2) The transcategorization from the ADJ looking adjectivization to the ADJ-looking adjectivization is a process of lexicalization. The study based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) finds that ADJ-looking adjectivizations are mode and register sensitive but not discipline sensitive. The modifier use prefers to occur more in hard science texts to increase the complexity of nominal groups and the predicative use prefers to occur more in soft science texts to increase the grammatical intricacy of sentences. The reason for the non-sensitivity across disciplines is that evaluative adjectives tend to occur in neither soft nor hard science texts.
Highlights
By what grammatical steps might a clause complex that straightforwardly realizes a semantic content as in (1a) be shifted to a simple clause realizing the same semantic content as in (1b)?(1) a
The study based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) finds that this process of adjectivization consists of two phases: (1) The downward rank-shift from the look ADJ construction to the ADJ looking adjectivization is a process of metaphorization; (2) The transcategorization from the ADJ looking adjectivization to the ADJ-looking adjectivization is a process of lexicalization
The modifier use prefers to occur more in hard science texts to increase the complexity of nominal groups and the predicative use prefers to occur more in soft science texts to increase the grammatical intricacy of sentences
Summary
By what grammatical steps might a clause complex that straightforwardly realizes a semantic content as in (1a) be shifted to a simple clause realizing the same semantic content as in (1b)?(1) a. In the process of nominalization, the conjunction group before realizing the logico-semantic relation between the two clauses is correspondingly shifted to the verbal group preceded realizing process in the simple clause in (1b). This shift is referred to as verbalization (He and Yang 2018). With the nominalization of the verbal groups, the personal pronoun they has been shifted to the processive pronoun their to function as the modifiers of the head nouns shredding and departure This process of downward rank-shift is referred to as a type of adjectivization of nominal groups identified by He (2019b). It is from nominalization, verbalization, and adjectivization that the clause complex in (1a) has been shifted to a simple clause in (1b)
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