A Syntactic Study of Attributive Adjectives in Two Selected Novels of Hemingway’s

The attributive function of the adjective word class is one of the most significant and major functions among all. Through their position before the head of the NP, attributive adjectives contribute significantly to the clarification and specification of the noun they modify. So, this research addresses the following questions: are attributive adjectives frequent in Hemingways works or not? Are they stacked in the prehead position or not? Is there any non-canonical ordering of the stacked adjectives or not? This research aims at investigating the use of attributive adjectives in two selected novels of Hemingways. It tries to analyze the use of these adjectives in terms of their frequency of occurrence and their ordering in the NP. This will be of pedagogical advantage to the teaching of these adjectives. To achieve the aims of the research, it is hypothesized that attributive adjectives are frequent in the two novels under investigation and that Hemingway uses consecutive attributive adjectives in the NP which mostly follow the canonical order. The mixed research methodology is followed and the data collected from two novels, namely, The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea are analyzed following Biber, et al.s model (1999) and Quirk, et al.s model (1985). The findings reveal that attributive adjectives are frequent in Hemingways works. However, he seemed to be rather restricted in his use of the consecutive adjectives in the prehead position. Additionally, most of the consecutive adjectives follow the canonical ordering proposed by Quirk, et al.s (1985) model.