A Study Of English Deverbal Adjectives' Semantic Connection With Syntactic Arguments

There are plentiful adjectives which are derived from verbs by adding the suffixes such as-able,-tive,-ous,-ory,-ary in English,namely,deverbal adjectives.Such kind of adjectives are quite subtle in semantics.The semantic compositions of deverbal adjectives are not entirely derived by adding the suffixes to the root verb.On the contrary,they imply abundant potential meanings.From a macro perspective,such adjectives can be semantically classified into low semantic saturation and high semantic saturation.The former is generally consistent with the senses of the verb from which the deverbal adjective is derived.Except for the meaning related to the action,there is little generation of new lexical meanings in the process of adjectivalization.And,to some extent,these words merely alter their grammatical meanings.For example,�competitive� means �relating to,characterized by,or based on competition�.While the latter denotes entities associated with the action,for example,the initiator of the action,the means by which an action is performed,the place where the action takes place and so on.For example,the deverbal adjective �competitive� means �(person)having or displaying a strong desire to be more successful than others � and �(of prices)low enough to compare well with those of rival traders�.The research concentrates on the senses of high semantic saturation of deverbal adjectives.It seems to have no clues to trace the semantic meaning of these words,but in fact,the meaning of English deverbal adjectives is in most cases encoded with great regularity,which can be observed and described from the perspective of argument structure and thematic roles.The research,first of all,collects eligible deverbal adjectives with regular expression,such as *able,*tive,*ous,*ory,*ary,in Corpus of Contemporary American English.Then comes the choice of the first 500 words of high frequency and deletes words that are not eligible.Based on the semantic observation of the collecting words,a classification of deverbal adjectives chosen is made from the perspective of argument structure and thematic roles activated by their root verbs.It is found that semantic meanings of deverbal adjectives are closely connected with thematic roles activated by their root verbs.From the perspective of argument structure,they can connect their meaning with external argument�the argument which is not contained in the maximal projection of the predicate,and internal argument�the argument which has to be realized inside the maximal projection of the predicate.When connected with external argument,from the angle of thematic roles,they mostly connect their meaning with percept and agent.When connected with internal argument,it can be further classified into direct argument and indirect argument.From the angle of thematic roles,the former is mostly related to the thematic roles of theme and patient,while the latter is most likely to connect its meaning with location and instrument.In addition,on the basis of a comprehensive description of deverbal adjectives chosen,the thesis proposes a theoretic explanation of both the regular and irregular phenomena in their semantic connection.It is found that there exists difference in the extent that the semantic meaning of deverbal adjectives is related to thematic roles of their corresponding verbs.Abundant examples manifest that internal argument is more likely to be given priority to enter into semantic meaning of deverbal adjectives,which demonstrates that the principle of subject-object asymmetry in transformational generative grammar�the relationship between internal argument and the predicate is much more closer than that between external argument and the predict�largely restricts the formation of high semantic saturation.However,this kind of restriction does not always work,and the exceptions seem to be explained from cognitive law of human beings.Lastly,based on the findings above,the research also summarized the overall trend in the formation of deverbal adjectives' high semantic saturation and low semantic saturation.If root verbs tend to be used more frequently and express more concrete meanings,their corresponding deverbal adjectives are likely to become high semantic saturation and vice versa.Deverbal adjectives with high semantic saturation can not only connect their meaning with agent and patient,but also theme,instrument,location and so on.Whereas deverbal adjectives with low semantic saturation in most cases are relevant to agent and patient.It is hoped that the research result might contribute a lot to semantic prediction and accurate understanding of the meanings of deverbal adjectives.