Corpus-based Study On "Adj. And Adj." Coordinating Principles

From the grammatical perspective, coordinate structure is a language unit inwhich conjuncts are combined equally, and its meaning and function remainunchanged when the order of conjuncts is rearranged. Actually, the order of conjunctsis not totally free because it is restricted by many factors such as the semanticrelations in conjuncts and the differences in phonetic features.In the previous studies about coordination, non-typical coordination attractsmuch more attention of scholars than typical coordination does. Some scholars haveconducted studies on binomials and obtained some coordinating principles, however,studies whose objects are limited to the “adj. and adj.” are relatively rare. Therefore,whether the coordinating principles obtained from previous studies are appropriate for“adj. and adj.” needs to be further tested.Based on LOB corpus, An in-depth and comprehensive study on “adj. and adj.”combinations is conducted to find out the underlying coordinating principles amongthem with the tools of MonoConc Pro2.2, AntConc3.2, and SPSS. This study spreadsout from four aspects: principles in phonology, principle in phonetics, principles inform, and principles in sense, and eleven “adj. and adj.” coordinating principles aregeneralized. The coordinating principles concluded from previous studies are foundnot completely applicable to “adj. and adj.” combinations, and four of these principlesare proved to be inconsistent with ordering of “adj. and adj.” combinations. Among allthese principles, priority is given to the principle of “short-before-long” and principlesin sense.With more objectivity in research method and more concreteness in researchobject, this study has overcome many shortcomings of the previous studies; therefore,the conclusions achieved in this paper will shed a new light on the theoretical valueand practical application in related studies.