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.

The objective of the thesis is to describe and compare the modifying uses of two adjectives which can appear both as premodifiers as well as bare postmodifiers, namely available and responsible. Both modifying positions are examined with respect to the textual environment, the complexity of noun phrases and adjective phrases in which the adjectives function, reference and other features in order to outline the patterns in which these two adjectives appear. The data for the analytical part have been extracted from the British National Corpus using the basic query and limiting the search to the written part of the corpus. After manual assessment of the initial samples of 500 concordance lines, 154 concordance lines containing the adjective available and 147 containing the adjective responsible proved to be suitable for the analysis. The final samples of the data are further categorized and analysed concerning the complexity of the noun phrase, premodification, postmodification and complementation of the adjectives, semantic preference of the head nouns, and the motivation for the pre- or postnominal placement of the modifiers. Key words: adjective, adjective phrase, premodification, postmodification, complementation, attributive function, predicative function, postpositive function, bare adjective,...