A Syntactico-Semantic Analysis of Emotive Adjectives in “The Doll’s House” By Katherine Mansfield

Abstract

As a prominent word class, adjectives are important in our everyday speech in general and in written works in particular. Adjectives have a key role in the construction of stories, novels, and poems. Adjectives have a descriptive power that can be achieved by their ability to be used in different syntactic categories to describe the characters, events, and the situations of the literary work. They can convey the meaning the writer wants to express since the use of adjectives facilitates the description of different shades of meanings. The core of this study aims to investigate the syntactic and semantic use of emotive adjectives in “The Doll’s House” By Katherine Mansfield. The study hypothesises that the use of adjectives in literary texts is worthy of concern due to the effect of adjectives on the meaning of literary texts. The writers depend heavily on adjectives to describe the situation intended, that is to say, the writer use suitable adjectives in a practical situation. The results of analysing the selected literary text show that the emotive adjectives is found to be less frequently used. The emotive adjectives are mainly used in the predicative position. Sine it is clear that the type of meaning expressed by an adjectival predicate has some bearing on the type of construction that allows complementation. The use of adjectives will help to arrange a good sentence which has a complete meaning especially in describing emotional or attitudinal states.