The Use of Adjectives in Modern Written English — A Study of their Distribution in Five Corpora —

Abstract

This thesis is a corpus-based study of adjectives and adjectival collocations in modern English. Five similarly constructed one-million-word corpora of American, British, and New Zealand English were analyzed to compare the distributions of adjectives and adjectival collocations in different regions, genres, and times when compiled. The findings included: (i) The use of adjectives in American English as represented by the Brown and Frown Corpora has increased more noticeably than in British English. (ii) Cultural and social emphases in different geographical settings are reflected in the use of adjectives in the corpora. (iii) Some adjectives occur mainly attributively and some mainly predicatively. (iv) Attributive use of adjectives accounted for approximately 77% of all adjective tokens in all corpora, and the use of attributive adjectives in American English increased more than in British English over a thirty year period between 1961 and the early 1990s. (v) The frequency and nature of attributive and predicative uses of adjectives in New Zealand English lies between British and American regional varieties of English. (vi) In all five corpora, more adjectives per thousand words were used in informative prose (especially in press and academic writing) than in imaginative prose, with the highest occurrence in the Frown Corpus of American English. (vii) Attributive use of adjectives occurred most in academic writing, while predicative use of adjectives was highest in fiction. (viii) Inflectional comparative and superlative adjectives were more frequent in all five corpora than periphrastic comparatives and superlatives, and a shift from inflectional comparison to periphrastic comparison could be identified over thirty years. (ix) The different distributions of adjective + noun collocations confirm earlier research that suggested that regionally compiled corpora can be used for showing and comparing cultural, social, and historical characteristics in different speech communities of English. Although the five similarly constructed one-million-word corpora were large enough to make generalizations about the distribution of adjectives and adjectival collocations, the analysis of a much bigger corpus such as the British National Corpus could be of benefit for such research.