Corpora: Sum: Adjective usage: attr. vs. pred.

[Stefan Th. Gries]

Dear subscribers

6 weeks ago I posted the following query to the list: "Does anybody have
some information on the relative frequencies of attributive and predicative
adjective usage?" In what follows I'll summarise the (unfortunately very
small number of) replies:

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David Lee (david_lee00 at hotmail.com) has referred me to his (PhD
dissertation) work on this issue for a subset of the BNC.

Robert Englebretson (reng at ruf.rice.edu) directed me tot he following three
references:
- Chafe, Wallace L. 1982. Integration and involvement in speaking, writing,
and oral literature. in Deborah Tannen, Ed. Spoken and written language:
exploring orality and literacy. 35-54. Norwood NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp.
- Thompson, Sandra A. 1988. A discourse approach to the category adjective.
In John A. Hawkins, ed. Explaining language universals. 167-210. Oxford:
Blackwell.
- Englebretson, Robert. 1997. Genre and grammar: predicative and attributive
adjectives in spoken English. BLS 23:411-421.
Also, he provided the following brief, but helpful, summary/discussion,
which I therefore quote in toto:
"Chafe's and Thompson's findings appear to be contradictory (Chafe reports a
nearly 2:1 ratio of attributive over predicative in a small corpus of
conversational English, while Thompson reports a nearly 2:1 ratio of
predicative over attributive in another conversational corpus). In my 1997
paper I argue that these findings are not contradictory, but in fact reflect
characteristics of the particular genre of conversational language each
researcher is looking at. The distribution of predicative and attributive
adjectives is closely tied to genre factors, and reflects the different
discourse functions for which they are used. I found roughly even
distribution in a larger corpus of conversational English (a subset of the
Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English), but when viewed in terms
of individual speech events, I found the skewed distribution noted by both
Chafe and Thompson. In a nutshell, the determinants of which is more
frequent has to do with genre, but ultimately with the amount of "new"
versus "shared" information among the speech participants in the
interaction."

Finally, Hans Lindquist (Hans.Lindquist at hum.vxu.se) pointed me to the
following source:
Lindquist, Hans, 2000. Livelier or more lively? Syntactic and contextual
factors influencing the comparison of disyllabic adjectives. John M. Kirk
(ed.)  Corpora galore. Analyses and techniques in describing English.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
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I am grateful to the three who have already replied - if anybody else has
further info, I would still be interested in it (and post it to the list in
turn).


Stefan Th. Gries
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IFKI, Southern Denmark University
http://people.freenet.de/Stefan_Th_Gries
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