Why Is nice and Adj So Much More Frequent than Adj and nice?—From the Perspective of Humans’ Social and Limited-Processing-Capacity Attributes
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Jinfang Peng
Jinfang P
ENG earned her MA in Applied Linguistics from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She is a self-employed researcher and English teacher. Her research efforts have focused on second language acquisition, corpus linguistics, and their application in English teaching.
Abstract
This paper investigates the phenomenon of imbalance between the frequencies of the nice and Adj and Adj and nice patterns from the perspective of humans’ social and limited-processing-capacity attributes. Humans’ social attribute requires that language users stay informative with minimal effort in communication, resulting in the from-the-least-to-the-most-informative information organization in discourse. Their limited-processing-capacity attribute requires that they resort to the production biases of “easy first” and “plan reuse” in order to achieve communicative efficiency in real-time production. The analysis of the occurrences of the nice and Adj pattern and native speakers’ judgment of the degree of informativeness of nice in these occurrences suggest that nice is largely delexicalized. Such delexicalization makes nice and Adj consistent with the information organization and allows language users to stay informative with the use of the pattern, thus in line with the social attribute, but not Adj and nice. In the meantime, nice is not only highly frequent but also conceptually salient when it comes to the positive property (Panther & Thornburg, 2009), making nice and Adj easier to produce and more likely to be reused than Adj and nice, thus in line with the limited-processing-capacity attribute. The analysis of the unbalanced frequency of the two patterns suggests that human attributes should be considered when studying language form, and this should offer insights into English learning.
About the author
Jinfang PENG earned her MA in Applied Linguistics from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She is a self-employed researcher and English teacher. Her research efforts have focused on second language acquisition, corpus linguistics, and their application in English teaching.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on improvement. Thanks also go to Professor Xiaofei Lu for his help with the survey and his comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.
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© 2020 FLTRP, Walter de Gruyter, Cultural and Education Section British Embassy
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- Why Is nice and Adj So Much More Frequent than Adj and nice?—From the Perspective of Humans’ Social and Limited-Processing-Capacity Attributes
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Reaching for the Gold Standard: Metaphors and Good University Teachers
- Researching Classroom-Based Assessment for Formative Purposes
- Using Social Media to Promote Intercultural Communication Between Chinese and American University Students
- Investigating Social Presence in Audio and Text Online Interaction for Language Learning
- A Study of Localization of Task-Based Language Teaching in China
- A Study of Three Variants of Gerund Construction from the Contrastive Perspective of Social and Natural Academic Abstracts on Construction Grammar Theory
- Why Is nice and Adj So Much More Frequent than Adj and nice?—From the Perspective of Humans’ Social and Limited-Processing-Capacity Attributes
- Abstracts
- Chinese Abstracts
