Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Words(119) a I know him
b he knows me
When a pronoun follows a verb, it has one form and this differs from the form it has
before the verb. We will return to this in more detail in subsequent chapters, but for
now all that is important to note is that these elements have different forms in different
positions, but we do not therefore conclude that they belong to different categories. We
will assume something similar is going on with the [–F, +N, +V] categories and that
adjectival and adverbial forms are different forms of the same category determined by
its use.
Though we will maintain the traditional terms for adjectives and adverbs, as there
has not been a common term developed for them (Radford 1988 has suggested Adjerb
or Advective, but surprisingly they did not catch on!). However, we will use the
general category label A to stand for this whole category.
Finally in this section, we turn to the subcategorisation of adjectives and adverbs.
We start with adjectives as these are the most straightforward. We have already seen
that adjectives, like nouns, cannot take nominal complements. However, all other
possibilities are open to them:
(120) a Reginald regrets the decision Reginald is regretful of the decision
b Harry hopes that it will snow Harry is hopeful that it will snow
c Rick responded to the treatment Rick is responsive to the treatment
d Rebecca rested Rebecca felt ill
The lexical entries for these adjectives might therefore be:
(121) regretful category: [–F, +N, +V]
-grid: <(experiencer) (theme)>
subcat: [prepositional]
hopeful category: [–F, +N, +V]
-grid: <(experiencer) (proposition)>
subcat: [sentential]
responsive category: [–F, +N, +V]
-grid: <(agent) (theme)>
subcat: [prepositional]
ill category: [–F, +N, +V]
-grid: <(experiencer)>
subcat: [∆]
The arguments of the adjectives are included as optional to allow for their non-
predicative use. When an adjective is used to modify a noun, it does not typically
appear with its arguments:
(122) a a regretful decision
b a hopeful football supporter
c a responsive audience
d an ill wind
The subcategorisation of adverbs is a rather more tricky issue. One would have
thought that if adverbs are formal variants of the relevant adjective, then they would