The purpose of this study was to translate a number of selected pages from the book Horses Talking by Margrit Coates into Swedish. An analysis of the source text and the translation was carried out with the focus on three aspects: hedging, adjectives and non-finite ing-participles. The subject of the translated text lies within the broad field of animal behaviour, parapsychology and telepathy, and focuses exclusively on communication between humans and horses. Given the nature of the text, which contains cautious advice and qualified recommendations to the reader, hedging has an important function to fill. Furthermore, there are many adjectives, which give the text a certain character, and they are essential to the message of the book: how to create a good relationship between humans and horses. Theories within the translation shift approach were applied to the study. In particular, Catford’s model and terminology were looked at. Hedging at word and phrase level primarily proved to be realised by the use of modal auxiliary verbs as hedges in the source text; this application was also primarily transferred into the target text. The most common translation strategy used was literal translation. A compound noun or noun (class shift) and a prepositional phrase (unit shift) were the most common translation methods for the attributive adjectives in the analysis. The predicative adjectives were primarily translated with a verb (class shift) or a verb phrase (unit shift) and with a prepositional phrase (unit shift). For the non-finite ing-participles, a variety of methods were applied, among which the most important were the att-infinitive (grammatical shift) and a relative clause (unit shift).

The aim of this investigation was to study what adjectives the media uses when describing female and male football players and sportswomen and sportsmen. The objective was to see if the adjectives described men and women differently and whether the adjectives reinforced gender stereotypes. To see the frequency an adjective had an online corpus was used and the analysis was based on Fairclough´s model of critical discourse analysis. The results showed that many adjectives were used for both genders. However, adjectives regarding appearance only showed in the results for women. In conclusion, the men and women were described in similar ways, however, as the women were also described by their beauty indicates that the media reinforces the gender stereotypes in certain ways.

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This diploma thesis deals with the semantics of Dutch adjectives, their categorization and internal classification. The first section observes and analyses the criteria for delimiting adjectives as an independent word class and establishing adjectival subcategories, as dictated by the most influential Dutch grammar publications. One key area of focus is the concept of gradability and its role in delimiting and classifying adjectives. These definitions and classifications are confronted using the scalar approach, according to which adjectives represent a scale of properties and may be sorted depending on which type of scale they express. The practical section comprises a corpus study whose aim is to examine the validity of the assumptions formulated in the theoretical introduction regarding the gradability of adjectives. Using a sample of 100 adjectival lemmas with the lowest coefficient value for the likelihood of gradability, acquired from the Dutch language corpora CGN and SoNaR, the study follows a set of morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse variables which may warrant the use of the comparative or superlative even with adjectives which are generally considered to be ungradable. The results of the analysis suggest that it is more appropriate to regard gradability as a statistical...

The thesis deals with evaluation in English newspaper discourse. The corpora analysed were newly created for the purposes of the sub-analyses; they comprise articles from three British online newspapers - three tabloids (the Sun, the Express, the Mirror) and broadsheets (the Telegraph, the Independent, the Guardian). The classification of the thesis' core dimensions of evaluation - opinion and emotion - draws on Appraisal Theory (Martin and White, 2005). The thesis pursues answers to two fundamental questions 1) What means do British online newspapers use to express evaluation? 2) What differences (if any) are there in construing evaluation between the tabloids and the broadsheets? In order to obtain the answers, at first, a small manual analysis of six 'positive' and six 'negative' articles (one from each newspaper) is conducted. Attention is paid to the key word analysis and the word classes expressing evaluation, namely adjectives, nouns, and verbs. Based on the findings, I decided to explore evaluation conveyed by adjectives, in the second part of the study, by employing evaluative adjective lexico- grammatical patterns described by Hunston and Sinclair (2000) and further amended by Bednarek (2007b, 2009). These patterns, which are associated with the dimensions of opinion and emotion, are...

This master thesis deals with the synthetic absolute superlative in contemporary Portuguese and its Czech counterparts. The aim was to describe the phenomenon in detail, explain the usage of doublet forms and discover the most frequent Czech counterparts of the absolute superlative in Portuguese language. The research was based on a corpora analysis of a Portuguese corpus named Corpus do Português and on a contrastive analysis of the parallel corpus Intercorp. The results show that in the case of the usage of the doublets, the borders between spoken and formal language might fade away, one of the doublets (formal vs. informal) often dominates and the usage is also influenced, apart from the level of formality, by other factors, for example by the variety of Portuguese. The most frequent Czech counterpart of the absolute superlative is a positive adjective usually bearing a higher value of expressiveness than the Portuguese adjective. The Czech language expresses the value of the absolute superlative primarily through its lexicon. Other counterparts are various expressions using adverbs, prefixes, diminutive or augmentative suffixes etc. In conclusion, a reverse control was made, and we identified the most frequent equivalents of several chosen Czech counterparts.

The present MA thesis studies adjectives of positive evaluation in present-day spoken British English. Other means of expressing subjective stance (e.g. intensifiers) were repeatedly described as undergoing constant change. However, variation in evaluative adjectives has received little quantitative attention so far (perhaps with the exception of Tagliamonte & Pabst, 2020). Our material consists of two corpora of informal spoken British English: Spoken BNC2014 and the spoken, demographically sampled section of the original BNC (1994). The starting point for the analysis is a frequency list of adjectives, from which we select adjectives with evaluative potential which differ significantly in frequency across the two corpora. Three adjectives: amazing, awesome and cool, are described in greater detail. The use of evaluative adjectives is described from several perspectives. We focus on syntactic functions of the adjectives, their co-occurrence with intensifiers and their collocations. From a sociolinguistic point of view, we describe the use of the adjectives with respect to the age and gender of the speakers. The analysis showed that adjectives of positive evaluation are an unstable category, and the change in adjectival use was reflected in its distribution. At the same time, we note changes in...

Evaluative stances are common in narrative and realized at all levels of linguistic structure. In film reviews, evaluation has been recognized as one of the most important stages alongside description (Taboada, 2011). Following Martin & White’s Appraisal Theory of Evaluation, the present comparative study focuses on two sub-systems of Appraisal, namely Appreciation and Engagement. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: a) to compare the way in which film critics use evaluative, axiological adjectives to evaluate two different film types and b) to study how professional film critics use of two types of engagement devices, namely epistemic and opinion devices, to position their own claims towards other potential viewpoints. The study is also influenced by two previous claims: Holbrook’s claim that, in contrast to consumers who seem to prefer American-made, commercial films, expert critics usually appreciate complex cinematography and culturally diverse films; and Carretero’s claim that in professional film reviews opinion devices are an almost absent feature, since these tend to be replaced by epistemic devices. To further explore these claims, this comparative, corpus- based study focuses on the frequency of evaluation adjectives and engagement devices used by expert film critics for the positive or negative evaluation of two different films: the 2020 box office hit “Bad Boys for Life” and the 2018 art film “Cold War”. The study used a mixed-method design, first subjecting the realizations of Appreciation and Engagement to a quantitative analysis and following this with a qualitative discussion of results. The results indicate: a) that in the case of both films positive evaluations clearly surpass negative evaluations; however, individual examples seem to express a mildly deprecatory attitude towards commercial cinematography and b) that although the number of epistemic devices in the reviews clearly surpasses that of opinion devices, the frequencies of opinion devices is greater than that observed by Carretero.

This essay presents a study on gender differences with a focus on mild and strong swearwords and their pre-modifying adjectives when describing a person, based on findings from the BNC2014. Previous research implies that men and women use different types of swearwords, suggesting that men tend to use stronger language than women. The aim of this study is to investigate the usage of strong versus mild swearwords to analyze if there are differences in frequency and use of pre-modifying adjectives across gender. A set of mild swearwords (cow, git) and strong swearwords (dick, cunt) from Ofcom’s scale of offensiveness (Ofcom, 2016) was used to manually compare how men and women tend to differ in the way they use these words. Previous research on swearing in connection to gender, offensiveness, and pre-modifying adjectives is presented as well as a definition of the swearwords. The results show that the usage of mild and strong language is equally used in male and female speakers and that negative and other pre-modifying adjectives are most used together with these words. Hopefully, the findings in this study could shed more light on the topic of gender differences and swearing.

In this paper we refuse the generalized idea within linguists working on Spanish word formation that compounds with a verbal element in Spanish language are nouns. Based on different criteria (morphological, syntactic and semantic) and attending the evolution of Spanish language, we like to show in contrast that these formations are adjectives.