A Corpus-Based Analysis Of The Complementation Patterns Of The Adjective “Ashamed”

Abstract

The paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the predicative use of the adjective “ashamed” giving a full description of its complementation patterns with the help of the Valency Theory (VT – Herbst et al., 2004). The findings are based on a reference corpus extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) by using the SkE software. The analysis reveals the advantages of the approach used for learners at levels B1 and B2 while, on the other hand, it shows the insufficiency of information found in the main English dictionaries (OALD, LDCE, etc.). It also demonstrates how both language learning and teaching, and materials production could be optimized using the corpus-based analysis.