>LINGUISTICA PRAGENSIA 2021 (31) 2

Postpositives in English: in search of adjectives available

Pavlína Šaldová

 

 FULL TEXT   

 ABSTRACT (en)

Single postpositive adjectives as a minor type of noun postmodification in English are surveyed using a corpus sample to assess their retrievability, to provide an overview of the morphematic types, and their register distribution. Applying an ancillary test of positional mobility to characterize the postpositive occurrences, four broad groups are delimited. Postmodification by a-adjectives and adjectives in terminological compounds is infrequent, whereas the majority of the sample is constituted by adjectives in -able/-ible and in -ed, whose post-head position involves changes in semantic meaning, as well as occurrences which cannot be accounted for by the constraints stipulated in grammars. The frequency and patterning of available, responsible or necessary call for a re-evaluation of the function of postposition, encompassing all frequent forms and taking into account reference and other textual factors.

 KEYWORDS (en)

adjectives, corpus, English, noun phrase, postposition

 DOI

https://doi.org/10.14712/18059635.2021.2.2

 SOURCES

The British National Corpus, version 2 (BNC World). Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. Ústav Českého národního korpusu FF UK, Praha 2001. Accessed at WWW: http://www.korpus.cz [last accessed 12 April 2021].

The Oxford English Dictionary Online. March 2021. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed. com [last accessed 12 April 2021].

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