JJPR Predicative adjectives

Biber I41 Xiao D60 MFTE JJEPSTother MFTE JJPR MFTE JJPRother

Definition

Adjectives in predicative position after a copular verb (e.g., “the man is tall”, “she felt happy”).

Detection Rules

mfte

MFTE sweeps all remaining JJ/JJR/JJS as JJPR (line 1161). JJAT replaces JJ tag and is subtracted by count. QUAN, AMP, DWNT, EMPH, and HDG also REPLACE some JJ tokens before the sweep; excluded by index overlap. Semantic adj subclasses (JJATDother, JJCOLR, etc.) APPEND and are counted independently.

cql[pos="JJ|JJR|JJS"]

combine: _ & !QUAN & !AMP & !DWNT & !EMPH & !HDG & -JJAT

Requires: pos

semgrex{pos:/VB.*/}=cop >acomp {pos:JJ}=adj

Requires: pos, dep

pybiber

pybiber uses UPOS for all checks: linking verb (VERB or AUX) + ADJ (not JJ specifically) + next token not NOUN/ADJ/ADV. Excludes hyphenated adjectives.

cql[lemma={words} & upos="VERB|AUX"] [upos="ADJ" & word!=".*-.*"] [upos!="NOUN|ADJ|ADV"]

Word list (12 items)

act appear be become feel get look prove remain seem sound turn

Requires: word, lemma, pos, upos

Normalization

Per finite_verbs

Examples

That’s right.

Source: le_foll_2024

One of the main advantages of being famous...

Source: le_foll_2024

It must be absolutely wonderful.

Source: le_foll_2024

Sources

mfte — Le Foll, Elen & Shakir, Muhammad (2023/2025) : Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE) — Python version
pybiber — Brown, David West & Reinhart, Alex (2026) : pybiber — Python package for linguistic feature extraction and Multi-Dimensional Analysis
xiao_2009 — Xiao, Richard (2009) : Multidimensional analysis and the study of world Englishes

Notes

Biber 1988 counted only attributive adjectives.

View YAML source