QUANTITATIVE APPROACH TO ADJECTIVES IN THE NOVEL “THE GREAT GATSBY”

Abstract

In this paper I attempt to examine the adjectives that are used in The Great Gatsby, a novel by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. This paper analyses adjectives in morphological context and syntactic context. The findings and results indicate the total number of adjectives,  the percentage of the most frequent adjectives used in the novel, types of adjectives in morphological aspect, the position of adjectives (attributive and predicative), and adjectives with and without an adverb as a pre-modifier. Firstly, the total number of adjectives which is 2.701, 950 adjectives are of its own type and appear at least once and other 1751 adjectives appear from twice to 80 times in the The Great Gatsby. Secondly, from the total of 950 types of adjectives in the novel there are 410 adjectives that are repeated more than twice and 540 appear once. Then, the most frequent adjective which is used 80 times in the novel is the adjective old following: old young – 45 times, little – 38 times , white - 36 times, small – 33 times, and good -31 times.  Moreover,  from the morphological aspect, out of the total of 950 adjectives, the largest type of adjectives are with suffixes, on the other hand from the syntactic aspect 2060 are attributive adjectives and 641 are predicative from the total of  2701 adjectives used in the novel. Finally, out of total number of adjectives (2701), 174 have an adverb as a pre-head modifier, while 2527 and 94% does not have an adverb as a pre modifier. To sum up, based on the results, I can conclude that F. Scott Fitzgerald used rich language in terms of modifying things, places, events, people and so on in The Great Gatsby.

Keywords: adjectives, The Great Gatsby, frequency, morphology, syntax.