Cognitive Study Of English VC Compound Adjectives

Many scholars focus on English compound adjectives, but few pay muchattention to systematic studies of English VC compound adjectives. This thesisattempts to make a quantitative and qualitative study of English VC compoundadjectives in terms of semantics, syntactic functions and cognitive mechanism on thebasis of BNC and COCA. The main findings are: firstly, the left components possessthe features of [+dynamicity],[+continuity] and [+action]; the right componentsinvolve prepositions and adverbs possess the characteristics of [+space] and[+direction]；adjectives have the properties of [-affix],[-comparative],[-superlative]and [+state]; V-ingand V-edshow the traits of [+dynamicity] and [+accompanying]. Ineffect, V-ingand V-edhave been lexicalized as accompanying adverbials. Secondly,semantic features show left preference, right preference and zero preference. EnglishVC compound adjectives can be divided into endocentric and exocentric compounds,which can coexist occasionally. Verbs manifest the features of [+dynamicity],[+manner],[-state],[+result],[-direction] and [-causativity]. The more a verb hasfeatures, the more easily it can be combined with others to enter the VC compounds.The right components often denote result, state, or tendency of verbs or compounds.Thirdly, pre-modifier and predicative are the most frequent syntactic functions ofEnglish VC compound adjectives. Word frequency is inconsistent with syntacticfunctions in some cases. The morphology, semantics and syntactic functions ofEnglish VC compound adjectives are subject to the prototype category, showingdifferent degrees and models of prototype categorization features.