Abstract
Premodification patterns play a central role in the categorization of of-binominals in general, and particularly in the grammaticalization of the evaluative binominal noun phrase (a beast of a man) into an evaluative modifier (a beast of a Hollywood year), where the first noun functions as an extreme modifier. This paper compares a linear, construction-based account of the premodification patterns of the evaluative binominal noun phrase, evaluative modifier, and other historically related of-binominals to a hierarchical account in Functional Discourse Grammar in order to investigate in what way each theory captures and accounts for these patterns. The paper comprises two parts: First, based on a zone-based premodification model, an empirical study of the synchronic premodification distributional patterns of these of-binominals is presented. Second, the paper discusses a Functional Discourse Grammar explanation of the findings. In the conclusion, the theoretical implications of the explanations of these patterns in the two approaches are discussed.
Acknowledgements
I would like to give a special thanks to Arne Lohman and Andreas Baumann for their advice and support on the empirical part of this project, and to Evelien Keizer and the Fun*Cog research group for their insightful feedback at all the different stages.
Corpora
Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million
words, 1990–present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
Davies, Mark. 2010–. The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million
words, 1810–2009. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Long-standing issues in adjective order and corpus evidence for a multifactorial approach
- Linear vs. hierarchical: Two accounts of premodification in the of-binominal noun phrase
- A cognitive-functional approach to the order of adjectives in the English noun phrase
- Adjective orders in Cimbrian DPs
- How real are adjective order constraints? Multiple prenominal adjectives at the grammatical interfaces
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Long-standing issues in adjective order and corpus evidence for a multifactorial approach
- Linear vs. hierarchical: Two accounts of premodification in the of-binominal noun phrase
- A cognitive-functional approach to the order of adjectives in the English noun phrase
- Adjective orders in Cimbrian DPs
- How real are adjective order constraints? Multiple prenominal adjectives at the grammatical interfaces