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Linear vs. hierarchical: Two accounts of premodification in the of-binominal noun phrase

  • Elnora ten Wolde EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: February 16, 2019

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, 18102009. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.

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Published Online: 2019-02-16
Published in Print: 2019-03-26

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