HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR TEA? THE LEXICOGRAMMAR OF <ADJ + TEA> CONSTRUCTION IN THE CORPUS OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ENGLISH

Abstract

One of the functions of adjectives is attributive to its head. This study is aimed at describing the adjectives that frequently co-occur with TEA. Tea is one of the beverages that are familiar with people all around the world. Adjectives here take a crucial role in describing the TEA. I here retrieved the top 100 adjectives that collocate with TEA in the corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and mapped their semantic and grammar class. The results are thematically divided into three parts. In terms of frequency, the phrase <iced tea> is the most frequent pattern, which took 860 hits. The last (100th) pattern is <giant tea>, which only got 4 hits. In terms of grammar, the retrieval indicates that adjectives in <ADJ + TEA> construction may take the following forms: stem, derivates, hyphenated and spaceless compound. And the last, in terms of semantic categorization, +MANIPULATION, +TASTE, and +ORIGIN are some of the most frequent classes, which are shown by the following examples respectively; <iced tea>, <mint tea>, <EnglishTea>. This authentic data driven result might assist learners of English as a Foreign Language as adjectives that co-occur with tea in their native languages might be different to some extent.