A study on the postposition of adjectives ending in-ible and -able

• Main Author: Renman, Josefin
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen 2021
• Subjects: Postpositive adjectives; The -ble suffix; The -ible suffix; The -able suffix; Corpus Study; General Language Studies and Linguistics; Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik; Specific Languages; Studier av enskilda språk
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-194234

In the English language adjectives can either be placed before the noun or after the nounin the noun phrase. This thesis is concerned with the postposition of adjectives inEnglish. It is particularly concerned with adjectives ending in -ible and -able which caneither take a prepositive or postpositive position when modified by a superlativeadjective, only or next etc. In the theoretical section of this study, reasons for whypostposition might occur and historic information about the -ble suffix are described.The usage of these adjectives in both the prepositive and postpositive position isfurthermore excerpted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Twentyadjectives from the adjective sample are further analysed in detail regarding theirpostposition, to ascertain which characteristics might lead to postposition, in principlesemantics, domain usage, etymology, syntactic function, and the characteristics of theirnoun collocates. Ten nouns are further analysed using the same criteria to ascertain ifcertain nouns can affect the postposition of adjectives in the noun phrase. From theseexamples, conclusions about the common characteristics of adjectives ending in -blethat prefer the postpositive position are drawn. The results showed that -ible adjectiveshad a 17.4% tendency to be postposed, whereas -able adjectives had a 17.5 % tendencyto be postposed. Which can be compared to the 4.6 % chance that an adjective ispostposed in English. -Ible and -able adjectives were, furthermore, mostly postposed inprepositional phrases, phrases with complements and in fixed expressions. The -ibleadjectives were also often of Latin or French origin, whilst the -able adjectives were ofFrench origin. These adjectives were moreover commonly used in the academic domainand denoted a dynamic sense. Their noun collocates were, lastly, commonly inanimate,intangible objects used in the academic domain.