Adjectival forms in Middle English: syntactic and semantic implications.

Abstract

[Abstract] Our main purpose in this paper is to look into the place of adjectives in a particular period in the history of English as regards their position in the Noun Phrase and whether such position may somehow alter the meaning of the adjective and of the NP itself. To this end, only adjectives in an attributive function both as premodifiers or postmodifiers of the head will be considered. In section 1 we will briefly attempt to draw a line between the class “adjective” and other morphological classes considering different viewpoints. Section 2 will be devoted to the consideration of word-order as one of the factors characterising adjectives inside the NP and how their position may alter the meaning of the whole phrase. The next step in our research will be embodied in section 3 where we will present the corpus material for our study taken from the Middle English part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and section 4 will provide the analysis of the data obtained from our evidence. Section 5 will finally supply our conclusions. We will attempt —if possible— to find an explanation grounded on syntactic and semantic criteria for the different shades of meaning found to depend on position.