A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF THE POSTPOSITION OF CENTRAL ADJECTIVES

Sažetak

This paper deals with adjectives as post-head modifiers in noun phrases. The aim of the quantitative and qualitative analysis conducted on the British National Corpus was to find out which type of adjectival postmodification is most common. We analysed the position of a hundred central adjectives in five thousand sentences looking for the cases of adjectival postmodification. The postposed adjectives were then classified according to the type and counted. We found out that the most frequent type of adjectival postmodification is the one where the postposition is due to the heaviness of the adjectival phrase (adjectives with a complement or a modifier). The second most frequent type was the type of postmodification in which the postposition is governed by the head of the noun phrase, i.e. a compound indefinite pronoun. Furthermore, our analysis showed that postposition of coordinated descriptive adjectives is more frequent than expected, considering that this type of postmodification is not obligatory.