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Article published In:
Comparing Crosslinguistic Complexity
Edited by Jenny Ström Herold and Magnus Levin
[Languages in Contrast 24:1] 2024
► pp. 57–83

Structural and semantic features of adjectives across languages and registers

| University of Oslo , Norway

This study focuses on the seemingly simple grammatical category of adjectives. However, the framework adopted for analysing adjectives from both a cross-linguistic and a cross-register perspective highlights features of grammatical complexity within phrases as well as contrastive complexity within and across languages and registers. Using English-Norwegian comparable data from the fictional sub-registers of narrative and dialogue, the analysis uncovers both similarities and differences in the structural and semantic features of adjectives. Most notable is perhaps the impact of register at all levels of analysis, including adjectival function (attributive vs. predicative), the degree of phrase complexity and semantic class. The contrastive analysis proper, i.e. comparing adjective use across languages, reveals that English and Norwegian have more in common within each sub-register than across them. For example, the lexico-grammatical behaviour of adjectives in English narrative has more in common with Norwegian narrative than it has with English dialogue. To the extent that there are clear general differences between English and Norwegian, these are mainly found in the proportions and preferences of a few specific features.

Keywords: adjectives, phrase complexity, dialogue/narrative, English/Norwegian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Material and method
    • 3.1The corpus and the comparable contrastive method
    • 3.2Data extraction method and the data set
    • 3.3Lexico-grammatical classification of adjectives
      • 3.3.1Structural classification
      • 3.3.2Semantic classification
  • 4.Contrastive analysis of the lexico-grammar of adjectives
    • 4.1Attributive vs. predicative function across languages and registers
      • 4.1.1Verbs in the (predicative) NP+V+AdjP pattern
      • 4.1.2The complexity of phrases
    • 4.2Semantic class of adjectives according to function
      • 4.2.1Semantic class of attributive adjectives across languages and registers
      • 4.2.2Semantic class of predicative adjectives across languages and registers
  • 5.Summary and discussion of findings
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00035.ebe
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