A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF ADJECTIVES IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH
Jing Cao · 2011
This thesis describes a systematic study of adjectives in contemporary English. In particular, the study employs large collections of naturally occurring texts to investigate the use of adjectives against different text categories as embodied in the corpora. A major objective is to chart the correlation between different types of texts and the variational characteristics of adjectival constructions. The study draws on the most recent development in corpus linguistics as well as the state of the art in artificial intelligence in general and machine learning techniques in particular for the extraction and analysis of differentiating adjectival features in relation to a taxonomy of text categories. Three major research issues are identified, including 1) the correlation between adjectives and text categories, 2) the correlation between adjectives and subject domains, and 3) the possible application of adjectives in the field of automatic text classification. Two corpora are employed in the investigation. The British National Corpus (BNC) is used for lexical investigation and the British component of International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) is used for the exploration of syntactic features. While the empirical data obtained from the BNC confirms the findings from previous studies that adjectives are preferred in writing than in speech, and that adjectives tend to occur more often in more formal texts than in less formal texts, an analysis of the textual dispersion of adjectives across different text categories has further suggested that adjectives are more likely to be a stylistic factor rather than a content factor. Linear regression analyses also