I have become very interested in the complementation patterns of adjectives as my students make a number of errors in this area. I am particularly interested in adjective patterns containing infinitives and gerunds, but I would also like to know of studies which compare the latter to the pattern adjective+"that clause". Unfortunately, there are far fewer studies of adjective valency patterns in English than there are of verb or noun patterns.
Ilka Mindt's book on adjective complementation focusses on "that clauses."Tor Arne Haugen's articles on Research Gate provide an interesting discussion of what constitutes a valency pattern and of the possibility of predicting patterns from the semantics of the target adjectives. However, he focuses on adjectival patterns in Norwegian and points out that Norwegian has different valency patterns from English. Makoto Sumiyoshi's article “ Valency Patterns in Dictionaries” contains something on adjective patterns but far more on verbs. I have ordered Francis et al's book “Cobuild Grammar Patterns 2: nouns and adjectives” and expect to find it very useful but maybe slightly outdated.
Can anyone point me to other books, articles or conference papers on this area?
I can recommend my own monograph (and several of my papers referenced therein), which deals with clausal complements of deontic adjectives in English, from a synchronic as well as diachronic perspective:
Van linden, An. 2012. Modal Adjectives: English Deontic and Evaluative Constructions in Diachrony and Synchrony. Berlin: Mouton.
This is an interesting research focus. I am particularly thinking of the relationship between adjectives and adverbs--their relative valencies, and how they may be sub-sets of a larger set, what Radford [1980] refers to as "advective," and look forward to your interesting findings.
Hi Chris,
my papers are all on Research Gate (full text), but my monograph (Van linden 2012) is not (because of copyright issues). I especially recommend 3 papers:
synchronic+ little diachrony (extraposition constructions):
Van linden, An & Kristin Davidse. 2009. The clausal complementation of deontic-evaluative adjectives in extraposition constructions: A synchronic-diachronic approach. Folia Linguistica 43.1: 175–217.
diachronic development in distribution of that- vs. to-clauses (extraposition constructions):
Van linden, An. 2010. The rise of the to-infinitive: Evidence from adjectival complementation. English Language and Linguistics 14 (1): 19–51.
diachronic development of voice type of to-inf in cnxs that resemble 'tough'-constructions:
Van linden, An. 2008. Activity-oriented and characteristic-oriented constructions: The distribution of voice in the history of the post-adjectival infinitive. English Text Construction 1 (2): 239–266.
Adjective complementation: a valency approach to making EFL dictionaries by Herbst, Thomas (Applied Linguistics, Jan 1, 1984, Vol.5, p.1) is a very good article. Start from there and you will not regret.