A corpus-based study of the evolution of N+N structures in present day English

• Autores: Iria Pastor Gómez
• Localización: Proceedings of the 30th International AEDEAN Conference: [electronic resource] / María Losada Friend (ed. lit.), Pilar Ron Vaz (ed. lit.), Sonia Hernández Santano (ed. lit.), Jorge Casanova García (ed. lit.), 2007, ISBN 978-84-96826-31-1
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • A considerable amount of work has been done on NOUN+NOUN structures (drug addiction, rain cloud) in the 20th century. Occasionally, there have been critical views that have considered these structures as a way of losing clarity in order to gain brevity and compactness. However, time has proved these constructions to be productive devices nowadays. The main goal of my work is the analysis of those nominal groups in Present-Day English, their internal structure, how they are evolving and whether they are increasing in use and are therefore more productive. I have analysed examples taken from four matching corpora of written British and American English, namely LOB / BROWN (sampling year: 1961), and FLOB / FROWN (sampling years: 1991-1992) and related them to three variables: genre, speech community and diachrony. A number of criteria have been applied to the examples obtained, namely, morphosyntactic (coordination and modification), orthographic, phonological, and semantic, in order to discern which of the examples are subject to a lexicalisation process and thus see what is the extent to which they are rooted in the language.