Investigating the English ADJECTIVE OF Construction in Academic Writing

Investigating the English ADJECTIVE OF Construction in Academic Writing Li-Yin Chen Siaw-Fong Chung Department of English Department of English National Chengchi University National Chengchi University No. 64, Sec. 2, ZhiNan Road No. 64, Sec. 2, ZhiNan Road Taipei City 11605, Taiwan Taipei City 11605, Taiwan lychen.tw@gmail.com sfchung@nccu.edu.tw Abstract This study investigates the English [ADJ of] construction in academic writing. The target construction represents a subclass of the predicative adjectives (The children are happy.) in English. While the predicative adjectives have long been recognized to function either as a subject complement (e.g., The children are happy.) or object complement (e.g., He made the children happy.), typically found in copular constructions, these adjectives with a complement such as a prepositional phrase (incapable of…, suggestive of…, etc.) are less discussed in the literature. The purpose of this study is therefore to examine this group of adjectives to see what particular roles they play in academic writing. A cross-disciplinary investigation was carried out to identify possible variations among disciplines. The corpus results showed that cross-disciplinary variations are only found in the extent of predicative adjective premodification and description of mental state, both of which are far more common in the humanities and social sciences than natural sciences and medicine. The uniformity across discipline calls for attention to instruction in the field of English for Academic Purposes. 1 Introduction The English adjectives can be distinguished into attributive and predicative types. While the attributive adjectives occupy the prenominal position (e.g., a beautiful day), the predicative adjectives are postverbal (e.g. This is particularly important.). Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999) compared the distribution patterns of these two types of adjectives across four genres (conversation, fiction, news, and academic prose) and found that the attributive adjectives are highly distributed in the academic genre as compared to the other genres. The predicative adjectives, on the other hand, do not seem to occupy a fair share in academic writing. However, to date, not much discussion has been given to the predicative adjectives in academic writing. Most importantly, their discourse functions remain unelucidated. Quirk, Greenbauum, Leech, Svartvik (1985) explained that the predicative adjectives may function either as a subject complement (1) or object complement (2). (1) The children are happy. (2) He made the children happy. (Examples taken from Quirk, 1985: 417) It is also possible for the predicative adjectives to complement clauses as shown in (3). (3) I consider what he did foolish. (Quirk, 1985: 417) As illustrated in (3), the predicative adjectives can be found to complement clauses in addition to noun phrases. Biber et al. pointed out that the predicative adjectives characterize their preceding target from a postmodifying position or called postposed (Biber et al., 1999: 519). A group of predicative adjectives that draw our interest in this study are those carrying a complement in the form a succeeding of-phrase, as in underlined in (4) and (5). PACLIC 32 73 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong Kong, 1-3 December 2018 Copyright 2018 by …

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