The Interrelationship between Grammatical and Semantic Properties of Adjectives

The Interrelationship between Grammatical and Semantic Properties ~

********* Lee

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the *** International Congress of Linguistics, Seoul, Korea.

Author Name

(OOO University)

Last Name, First Name. 2009. The interrelationship between grammatical and semantic properties of adjectives. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 00-0, 745-766. The purpose of this paper is to understand the category of adjective properly by investigating the interrelationship between semantic and grammatical properties. The following respects–semantic difference according to position, meaning types and grammatical properties, distinguishing indicators between participial adjectives and verb participles, and syntactic and semantic characteristics according to adjectival complementation types–are dealt with in this study. As a result, it should be noted that we need to recognize the importance of the interaction between grammar, meaning, and lexical idiosyncrasy. The discussion of grammaticality without considering the lexical and semantic properties of adjectives has some limitations for proper understanding and use. (OOOO University)

Key words: interrelationship, grammatical and semantic properties, position, meaning types, participial adjectives, complementation

1. Introduction

1.1

1.1.1

Adjectives are, when used as predicative complements or objective complements, an obligatory element of a sentence. When they are used as modifiers, they are optional elements. According to Altenberg(1993, cited in Kennedy (2003, p. 126), when the complement was an adjective, SVC type accounted for 45.6% of the 5,004 examples and SVOC type 1.5% in an investigation of the relative frequency of use of clausal patterns in 5,004 examples of the recurrent word sequences extracted from the  London-Lund Corpus of Spoken British English. Additionally, another main function is as a modifier, typically realized more frequently in written genres than in spoken English (Kennedy, 2003).

2.  The Semantic Difference According to the Position of Adjective

2.1

2.1.2

In terms of position, adjectives occur attributively and predicatively. When they occur attributively, they are used as premodifiers (e.g. useful advice) or postmodifiers (e.g. something useful). In contrast, when adjectives are used predicatively (e.g. Your advice is useful., He makes her happy.), they function as subject complement or object complement and in such clause types as SVC or SVOC, predicative adjectives are obligatory elements. In this case, there is a copular relationship between subject and subject complement and between object and object complement.

Generally, with regard to the uses of adjectives, there are criteria for establishing adjective classes and some examples are given below (Quirk et al. , 1985, p. 404).

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References

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[200-701]  Department of English Education, *********** University

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E-mail: **********@*****.ac.kr

Received: November 6, 2008

Revised: November 26, 2008

Accepted: December 16, 2008