Colour Adjectives in British and American English

The present thesis studies the gradability, i.e. essentially the ability of colour adjectives to take inflection and classify them in sense of syntax and semantics. This contrastive study aims to determine whether it is possible to describe the differences between British and American English in the possibility of gradation of these adjectives, the type of inflection of the particular six colour adjectives and analyze the frequency of inflected adjectives in comparison with semantic and syntactic features. The analysis is based on data from the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English. The colour adjectives are examined in comparative synthetic and analytic constructions, as well as with premodifiers very and really. Next, the inflected adjectives are analyzed quantitatively concerning British and American varieties and subsequently from the syntactic as well as semantic points of view such as the meaning of the inflected colour adjectives, or the position of such adjectives in relation to a noun phrase. The thesis consists of two parts: the theoretical part which introduces form, function, position, syntax and semantics of adjectives, and the empirical part consisting of the quantitative part that selects six colours and analyzes their use in a comparative and the..