It Is Surprising: Do Participial Adjectives after Copular Verbs Form a Special Evaluative Construction? A Contrastive View

Abstract

The chapter combines corpus linguistics, data-driven research and some elements of construction grammar. The larger perspective is that of POS-categories and of their behaviour in specific constructions, drawing on insights by I.

Poldauf. The chapter looks into the so-called present participles (-ing forms) in Czech and English, while comparing the "It/That is + V-ing" construction also with its German counterparts.

The findings indicate specific - evaluative - semantics to be inherent to this construction in all the investigated languages.

Keywords

• corpus linguistics
• construction grammar
• contrastive linguistics
• participle, -ing forms
• parts of speech
• categorization