ESL grammar books have lists of present and past participial adjectives based on author intuition rather than actual word frequency. In these textbooks, the –ing and –ed participial adjectives derived from transitive verbs of state and emotion are presented in pairs such as interesting/interested, boring/bored, or surprising/surprised. This present study used the Corpus of Contemporary American English http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ (COCA) to investigate the overall frequency of participial adjectives in use as well as their frequency within certain varieties of contexts. The results have shown that among most frequently used participial adjectives there are not only the participial adjectives derived from transitive verbs of psychological state, such as interesting/interested, but also the participial adjectives derived from transitive verbs of action with their intransitive equivalents, such as increasing/increased. The data also revealed that many participial adjectives lack corresponding counterparts and thus cannot be presented in –ing/-ed or -en pairs (e. g., existing, ongoing, concerned, supposed). Finally, a majority of the differences between participial adjectives, including the differences between present (-ing) and past (-ed or -en) participial adjectives, are reflected in their collocations. This study suggests that a new approach of teaching participial adjectives along with their collocations in relation to their frequencies in particular contexts can help second language learners develop awareness of how and when these participial adjectives should be used to convey an individual’s intended meaning in a native-like manner
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-3782 |
| Date | 01 January 2013 |
| Creators | Reilly, Natalia |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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