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This book presents a series of studies on premodifying -ing participles and adjectives in English. The studies are intended to contribue to our understanding of a variety of topics, including the meaning and function of participles and other adjectival premodifiers, their use in different registers, and their change over time. The overarching topic that connects all the articles thematically is linguistic categorization, which is here understood as a process of abstraction through which language users group linguistic elements together according to their form, meaning, function and patterns of use. In addition to introducing new empirical corpus-based studies of adjectival modification in English, the book includes a wide-ranging survey of linguistic and philosophical approaches to categorization. The results of the studies presented in this book shed new light on the history and use of adjectival modifiers in English. They also bear on some central theoretical questions concerning linguistic categorization. More specifically, the studies provide support for usage-based theories of language and language change, showing, for example, that there is a correlation between subjectivity and indefinite marking, and that degree modification is much more common in predication than in attribution in corpus data. Such results emphasise the fact that linguistic categories are rooted in actual patterns of use, and that usage should be taken as the basis of word class categorization instead of a word's distributional potential.

English language --- Grammar, Comparative and general --- Adjective.