A Corpus-based Study On Adjective Complementation

An adjective complement is a clause or phrase that modifies an adjective or adds to the meaning of the adjective.In this thesis adjective complementation by that-clauses or to-infinitive clauses will be analyzed on the basis of the British National Corpus (BNC). Within each type of complement clause, post-predicate clauses are the most frequent and can complement most types of adjectives, extraposed clauses rank the second and pre-predicate clauses are rare. It is found that extraposed clauses usually complement affective adjectives and post-predicate clauses usually complement evaluative adjectives. Second, the insertion of prepositional phrases between adjectives and complement clauses is discussed:for-phrases or of-phrases often can be inserted before fo-clauses to introduce the subjects of to-clauses, while prepositional phrases are less common before that-clauses. Then in the discussion of the combinations of adjectives and link verbs in the main clauses and the cases in which complement clauses are used as extraposed objects, whether the formal object it can be omitted or not is also taken into consideration. Finally, the factors that affect the choice between different adjective complement c lauses are analyzed. The present study points out that certain adjective occur only with certain type of complement clause, and for those adjectives which can be complemented by both that-clauses and to-clauses, the link verb in the main clause can be a decisive factor. Also some verb-adjective combinations that allow object extraposition have preference for certain type of complement clauses. More specifically, combined with genre variations, the present study explores the factors that affect the choice between parallel structures which can be used to express similar meaning, and three groups of such parallel structures are distinguished. Factors such as whether the subject of the main clause and the subject of complement clause are co-referential and whether modality and tense should be expressed in the complement clauses can be decisive.