Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T07:32:49.049Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A difficult to explain phenomenon: increasing complexity in the prenominal position

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2018

CHRISTINE GÜNTHER
CHRISTINE GÜNTHER*
Affiliation:
Department of English Language & Linguistics, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germanychristine.guenther@uni-duesseldorf.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In English, the position of the AP in the nominal phrase is determined by its form: only structurally simpler phrases are said to be licit in prenominal position, more complex ones have to follow the noun. Recent studies have reported an increasing use of nominal premodifiers in English, so the question arises whether this trend affects only simpler phrases or whether a new structural option emerges – complex APs in prenominal position. Drawing on data from COHA, this article investigates which types of AP occur prenominally. The data show that certain types of complex APs are gaining ground in the prenominal position. Most of these can be analyzed as complex words rather than complex phrases and hence do not indicate major syntactic changes in the English NP. However, some of the attestations, such as easy-predicates with a to-infinitival clause, are complex phrases. It is argued that it is the dependency relation between their rightmost element, a lexical verb, and the noun they modify which makes them occur in prenominal position.

Keywords

noun phraseadjectivescomplexityword order variationlanguage change
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 645 - 670
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bauer, Laurie & Huddleston, Rodney. 2002. Lexical word-formation. In Huddleston & Pullum (eds.), 1621–1721.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie, Lieber, Rochelle & Plag, Ingo. 2013. The Oxford reference guide to English morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Berlage, Eva. 2014. Noun phrase complexity in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Gray, Bethany. 2016. Grammatical complexity in academic English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Grieve, Jack & Iberri-Shea, Gina. 2009. Noun phrase modification. In Rohdenburg, Günter & Schlüter, Julia (eds.), One language, two grammars? Differences between British and American English, 182–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Brody, Michael. 1993. θ-theory and arguments. Linguistic Inquiry 24, 1–23.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 520 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ (accessed March 2017).Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2010–. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA): 400 million words, 1810–2009. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/ (accessed March 2016).Google Scholar
Dryer, Matthew. 1992. The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language 68 (1), 81–138.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John. 2004. Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John. 2014. Cross-linguistic variation and efficiency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hicks, Glyn. 2009. Tough-constructions and their derivation. Linguistic Inquiry 40 (4), 535–66.Google Scholar
Höglund, Mikko. 2014. ‘Self-discipline strategies were easy to design but difficult to adhere to’: A usage-based study of the tough construction in English. PhD dissertation, University of Tampere.Google Scholar
Hornstein, Norbert. 2001. Move! A minimalist theory of construal. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kunter, Gero. 2016. Coquery: A free corpus query tool. www.coquery.orgGoogle Scholar
Meibauer, Jörg. 2003. Phrasenkomposita zwischen Wortsyntax und Lexikon. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 22, 153–88.Google Scholar
Mittwoch, Anita, Huddleston, Rodney & Collins, Peter. 2002. The clause: Adjuncts. In Huddleston & Pullum, 663–784.Google Scholar
Nanni, Deborah. 1980. On the surface syntax of constructions with easy-type adjectives. Language 56 (3), 568–81.Google Scholar
Payne, John & Huddleston, Rodney. 2002. Nouns and noun phrases. In Huddleston & Pullum, 323–523.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo. 2003. Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Postal, Paul & Ross, John. 1971. ¡Tough movement sí, tough deletion no! Linguistic Inquiry 2, 544–6.Google Scholar
Pullum, Geoffrey & Huddleston, Rodney. 2002. Adjectives and adverbs. In Huddleston & Pullum, 525–95.Google Scholar
Sadler, Louisa & Arnold, Douglas. 1994. Prenominal adjectives and the phrasal/lexical distinction. Journal of Linguistics 30, 187–226.Google Scholar
Trips, Carola. 2014. How to account for the expressive nature of phrasal compounds in a conceptual-semantic framework. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 11 (1), 33–61.Google Scholar
Trips, Carola. 2016. An analysis of phrasal compounds in the model of Parallel Architecture. In ten Hacken, Pius (ed.), The semantics of compounding, 153–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Trips, Carola & Kornfilt, Jaklin. 2015. Typological aspects of phrasal compounds in English, German, Turkish and Turkic. STUF – Language Typology and Universals 68 (3), 281–321.Google Scholar
Wiechmann, Daniel & Lohmann, Arne. 2013. Domain minimization and beyond: Modeling prepositional phrase ordering. Language Variation and Change 25, 65–88.Google Scholar