Abstract
This is a study of adjectival modification, that is the use of adjectives and adjectival participles, in the genres of book information and place description. Book information represents a genre with a subtle, covertly persuasive function, while place description is taken to have little or no persuasive force. The study starts out with a quantitative element, establishing lexical densities of the eight texts in the data. This is followed by qualitative analyses of the functions which adjectives have in the genres examined. Answers are sought to these primary questions: 1) What is the role of modifying adjectives in the lexical density of the texts analysed? 2) What discourse functions do these adjectives fulfil in the two genres? The conclusions of the study include: 1) High occurrence of modifying items does not automatically equal nominal style. 2) High occurrence of modifying items is not an automatic sign of high lexical density. 3) The frequent use of modifiers in non-fiction is not limited to persuasion, since adjectives are also frequent in the genre in which the descriptive function is foregrounded.
Highlights
The purpose of this article is to explore how modifying is effected in the genres of book information and place description
It is interesting to note that the lowest frequency of adjectives in the genre of book information examined here is practically equal to the mean percentage of adjectives (7.7 percent) in Francis/Kuçera’s (1982: 547) count of adjectives in Informative Prose in the Standard Corpus of PresentDay American English – the Brown Corpus
First I quantified the lexical data in order to find out to what extent modifying items, that is adjectives and adjectival participles, were used in the genre of book information and compared the findings with those of a representative text from the genre of place description
Summary
The purpose of this article is to explore how modifying is effected in the genres of book information and place description. Modifiers are here understood as items which realise meanings associated with the classification and description of the participants. The items we are concerned with relate to nouns attributively or predicatively, that is adjectives and adjectival participles (Jackson 1990: 128). We are dealing with qualifying elements in discourse.. We are dealing with qualifying elements in discourse.1 These in turn are primarily associated with. Description may either point to fiction and to the aesthetic function of the text, to use Karl Bühler’s (1934) canonic classification, or description may be found in non-fiction, contributing towards persuasion. A persuasive strategy may be quite explicit or disguised in a seemingly neutral informative role
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