Page 226 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

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CHAPTER 9
dissipate establish rely
quickly/immediately firmly/solidly
completely/greatly
vs. slowly/eventually
vs. weakly/temporarily
vs. sporadically/occasionally
Adjectives have two main syntactic functions: attributive and predicative (see also chap. 4). Attributive (descriptive) adjectives precede nouns and noun phrases and modify them (e.g., human and financial capital). On the other hand, predicative adjectives mostly occur as subject complements following linking verbs (e.g. Computer chip markets arenew/competitive/profitable). Thus, predicative adjectives actually belong to a different type of syntactic structures than attribu- tive adjectives. The teaching of predicative adjective uses is discussed in some detail in chapter 4 on sentence and predicate constructions.
SYNTACTIC AND TEXTUAL FUNCTIONS OF ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS
In most cases, adverbs, like attributive adjectives, represent optional phrase or sentence elements (the only exceptions are those that function as subject or object complements). The primary function of adverbs is to modify ad- jectives (e.g., highly/somewhat desirable), other adverbs (e.g., very/particularly quickly), or entire sentences (e.g., Occasionally/Usually, economists disagree about their conclusions).
In general terms, adverbs can be classified by their meanings, such as
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time, place, reason, manner, and duration. Adverbs, as modifiers of all
types, supply information that deals with How? When? Where? Why? How long? How often? To what extent? Regardless of their meanings, however, among the main parts of speech (i.e., nouns, verbs, adjectives,and adverbs), adverbs are the least frequent in academic writing (Biber et al., 1999).
Adjectives, as modifiers of nouns, and adverbs, as modifiers of adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and entire sentences, can take a variety of forms: simple, usually one-word adjectives and adverbs (e.g., tall/short or quickly/slowly), as well as more complex, such as prepositional and other types of phrases (e.g., the partridge in the pear tree and In_the pear tree, we have a partridge). Complex modifiers of nouns are usually referred to as adjectivals, whereas adverbials modify everything that adverbs do. Both terms—the adjectival and the adverbial—refer to functions rather than parts of speech.
Analyses of large written and spoken corpora have demonstrated that adjectivals of all types as well as nouns are particularly common in academic writing, whereas adverbials and verbs in conversation and fiction (Biber et al., 1999) are less so. In addition, other studies of academic L2 learners have also shown that many L2 writers rely on limited vocabulary and restricted
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For the textual and discourse function of the subclass of certainty and intensity adverbs, see
chapter 12.
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