The present thesis studies the copular verbs and their co-occurrence with adjectival complements in contemporary written and spoken English. The theoretical part of this work first describes the copular verbs in terms of their types and types of complements they take. A corpus-based approach to copular verbs follows. A part of the theory also provides an overview of the terminology that is used with copular verbs. The work consists of two parts: the theoretical part which introduces the topic and describes the features of both the principal copula be and other copular verbs and the analytical part which analyses written language data excerpted from the Araneum Anglicum corpus and spoken language data from the Spoken BNC2014 corpus. The analytical part focuses on the following seven verbs: feel, look, seem, remain, become, go and get and their adjectival complements. These adjectives are then analysed in terms of their frequency and collocability with the verbs. The collocate lists of all verbs are then compared between the two corpora. Finally, the analysis also attempts to categorize the adjectives semantically. The analysis also focuses on adverbs which occur in these constructions and which function is to modify the adjectives. The results of the analytical part are summarized in the conclusion.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:nusl.cz/oai:invenio.nusl.cz:408736 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Coufalová, Adéla |
| Contributors | Lukešová, Lucie, Šaldová, Pavlína |
| Source Sets | Czech ETDs |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess |
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