Page 241 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS 227
4. Infinitives after specific adjectives that predominate in academic writing. The most frequent among these are: possible/impossible, easy, difficult, and hard, as well as a few others that can be grouped by their meanings (Hunston & Francis, 2000; Quirk et al., 1985; Swales & Feak, 1994).
Necessity adjectives: important, essential, necessary, vital (e.g., Heat is essen- tial boil the water or It is necessary to calculate ...).
Evaluation adjectives: better/best, appropriate/inappropriate, desirable, inter- esting, logical, reasonable/unreasonable, surprising, useful/useless, wise, wrong (e.g., Thepowerofnonverbalcommunicationcanbeuseful tonoticeinroutineinter- actions or By the age of twelve, most children know when it is appropriate or inappro- priate to establish eye contact with another person").
On the whole infinitives with adverbial functions are much more com- mon in written than in conversational discourse, and they are so prevalent in practically any type of writing that it may not be possible to produce a written assignment without them.
THE-RICH-AND-THE-POOR CONSTRUCTIONS
The conversion of adjectives to noun phrases is actually quite rare and occurs only in limited contexts, such as highly general texts in humanities. In fact some analyses call these constructions generic (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002): the young, the elderly, the impossible. Because these constructions are rare in aca- demic texts, only a couple of their characteristics need to be mentioned:
1. The-rich-and-the-poor phrases that refer to groups of people never take singular verbs (e.g., *the rich gets richer). In fact these structures refer to concrete nouns (i.e., those people who are rich or those people who are poor).
2. The-impossible phrases, such as the unlikely or the ridiculous, can take singular verbs because they have abstract meanings (i.e., what is impossible or that which is ridiculous). However, these structures are ex- ceptionally rare in academic writing (e.g., the impossible/the unthink- able has happened). These structures may not be worth the time and effort expended on teaching them.
3. Adjective-to-noun phrases are very inflexible and can only add the intensifier very (e.g., the very old and the very young). In fact, they cannot even take demonstratives or possessives (e.g., *these rich, *those very poor, *our old).
KEY ADJECTIVES IN THESIS ST A TEMENTS
As noted at the beginning of the chapter, adjectives play a defining role in academic prose. Although common descriptive adjectives are found practi-
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