| English past participles become one of the focuses of linguistic research because of its special usage.They perform as modifiers of nouns in English modifier-modifiee phrases,whose function is similar to that of adjectives,thus they are called Adjectival Past Participles,short for APPs.So far APPs have been studied at home and abroad,mainly from the perspective of traditional grammar,pragmatics as well as cognitive grammar.APP is derived from verb and functions like adjectives,so it share some attributes across the verb category and adjective category.Langacker(1991: 200)claimed that English past participle is known as verb containing PERF morpheme which has four variants.APP involves two PERF morphemes: PERF1(attributive APP)and PERF2(predicative APP).This paper mainly explores the former.That is,the usage of attributive APP.However,there is no consensus regarding the usage and function of APP so far.According to Cognitive Grammar's explanation about qualifying construction,premodifier ppl is treated together with adjectives since it describes atemporal situations recategorised as properties(Radden & Dirven,2007:145).In addition,Qin Yuxiang(2008)defined the function of APP as categorization or subcategorization.Jian Yao(2012)further distinguished two constructions of APP phrases: APP accompanied by adverb and single past participle used as APP).Then what role does APP as modifier play in the noun phrases? Hence,this paper is involved in two research questions: firstly,how are APPs,passive participles and perfect participles are associated since they are identical in form? Secondly,are APPs and adjectives interchangeable in that they perform the same syntactic function(as attributives and predicatives)? Based on the category-property continuum(Radden & Dirven,2007)and taxonomy of verb types(Vendler 1967),this research analyzes the structure,semantic as well as function of APP by comparing APP with its similar elements in English(as the passive participle and pure adjectives).The data of this paper are from British National Corpus(BNC).All the cases of “APP +noun”,the passive construction(“BE+ppl”),the perfect construction(“HAVE+ppl”)as well as prenominal pure adjectives(“adj.+noun”)are retrieved and extracted from BNC.The result of collexeme analysis,run on coll.analysis 3.2a,shows that APP,the passive participle and the perfect participle gather different verbs though they are identical in forms,indicating that the three participles have their own preference tendency when expressing meaning.the paper is involved in two research questions.Through comparing APP with pure adjective,we found that the usage of APP is very complex.Some APPs have the function of categorizing.Some APPs express newly attained characteristics of their modifiees or resultant state of an action,which is dynamic.Whereas adjectives describe a relatively stable and static property or state.This study finds that APPs with modifiers or prefixes are much more common in English,which is expected to shed some light on English teaching and helps Chinese EFL learners to learn language better. |
PDF Full Text Request