Tuesday 10 April 2018

Quality Attribution: Qualitative Verbs

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 271):
Verbs of this kind include  
  • matter, count ‘be important’ … 
  • suffice ‘be enough’, 
  • abound ‘be plentiful; 
  • figure ‘make sense’; 
  • differ, vary ‘be different, varied’; 
  • hurt, ache ‘be painful’; 
  • dominate ‘be dominant’, 
  • apply ‘be relevant’ … 
  • do ‘be acceptable, enough’ … 
  • remain ‘be + still’, 
  • stink, smell, reek … ‘be smelly’ … 
and a number of verbs of negative appraisal, some of them abstract versions of ‘be + smelly’, for example stink, suck