1 IntroductionFootnote 1
Studies on noun phrases abound in the linguistics literature, and come from a variety of different perspectives and theoretical backgrounds. As in many other areas of linguistic investigation, approaches are often significantly English-centred and attempt to identify in other languages those constructional features which are easily observable in the English noun phrase, thus trying to adapt the concept and structure of the English noun phrase to other similar constructions which may lie beyond the English model. In what follows we will focus on noun phrases specifically in English, although a number of the issues considered here can also be approached from a cross-linguistic (universal?) perspective. In fact, the universality of the notion of noun phrase, construed on the category of noun, is not free of controversy. As Rijkhoff (Reference Rijkhoff2002: 8) points out, ‘there are languages in which a major distinct class of nouns appears to be lacking and . . . many languages have nouns that cannot be distinguished from other major word classes (verbs, adjectives)’. He goes on to argue that ‘even if a language does employ nouns, this does not necessarily mean that the language in question has NPs’ (9–10). A radical view against a dependency relation between nouns and noun phrases is that of Dryer (Reference Dryer2004). Following a typological study of noun phrases that lack nouns and contain exclusively modifiers, Dryer hypothesises that ‘all noun phrases are headless’ (43), ‘nouns [being] just one of the many types of words that occur in noun phrases’ (69).
In the present study we will concentrate on the analysis of English noun phrases and accept their existence as phrasal constituents constructed around the minimal category noun. Large-scale comprehensive English grammars (Quirk et al. Reference Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik1985; Biber et al. Reference Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan1999; Huddleston & Pullum et al. Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002) avoid fine-grained morphosyntactic definitions of the noun phrase, and instead tend to list a number of grammatical features observable in this phrasal category, to which they add the core property of being headed by a noun on most occasions – we will come back to the issue of headedness in noun phrases below. For example, Payne & Huddleston (Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 326) contend that ‘[e]xcept in what we refer to as the fused-head constructionFootnote 2. . ., NPs consist of a noun as head, alone or accompanied by one or more dependents’.
From a semantic point of view, noun phrases are commonly defined as expressions of reference, that is, as linguistic materialisations of extralinguistic concepts, and not of attributes, events, actions, relationships, circumstances, etc., which are prototypically expressed by other phrasal categories. Biber et al. (Reference Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan1999: 232) maintain that ‘[n]ouns are the main lexical means of referential specification’, and Payne & Huddleston (Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 399) contend that, ‘by using [a noun] on a given occasion, a speaker intends to pick out some independently distinguishable entity, or set of entities, in the real world (or in some fictional word)’ (original boldface). In dealing with the semantics of the noun phrase, Rijkhoff (Reference Rijkhoff2002: 27) agues that ‘[n]oun phrases are referring expressions, but the entities they refer to are not entities in the external physical world [but] rather mental representations of entities’. In his four-layered analysis of the noun phrase, Rijkhoff (Reference Rijkhoff2008: 65) also contends that noun phrases fulfil a double semantic function; on the one hand, they provide a physical description of an entity, and on the other hand they are used for referring to entities in the world of discourse. Similarly, Keizer's (Reference Keizer2008) analysis of appositive constructions from a Functional Discourse Grammar perspective leads her to postulate a strict separation of the grammatical component, which contains only linguistic entities, and the contextual one, which includes extralinguistic entities to which the speaker refers by performing a referential act. Her conclusion is that, at the representational level, the variables,Footnote 3 materialised by noun phrases, should not be regarded as symbolising the intended referent, but rather ‘the mental extension set of an expression’ (2008: 211–12). Such a mental extension set, which is part of the long-term linguistic knowledge of the speaker, is wholly linguistic in nature and refers to the entire set of mental entities to which (in the view of the speaker) the property (or properties) described by the lexeme(s) used in an expression applies (or apply). According to Hengeveld (Reference Hengeveld2008), the separation of the interpersonal, the representational and the morphosyntactic levels of analysis that we find in Functional Discourse Grammar allows for a more transparent and systematic treatment of noun phrases.Footnote 4
In Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1991, Reference Langacker2004), where nouns are said to show significant parallels to the clause in their functional organisation, nouns profile things and are characterised abstractly as products of conceptual grouping and reification. The noun phrase, in turn, ‘profiles a grounded instance of a thing or process type’ (Langacker Reference Langacker2004: 77). Consequently, the defining features of the noun phrase are not to be found in its structural configuration but rather ‘in the semantic functions of type specification, instantiation, and grounding’ (Langacker 1991, cited in Reference Langacker2004: 77).
For present purposes, we will not explore further the nature of the referents which are designed by way of noun phrases or the straightforwardness of the linking relation between the formal status of the noun phrase and the extralinguistic concept the former conveys. Rather, we will simply assume that the semantic goal of a noun phrase is presentative in the sense that, by uttering a noun phrase, the speaker is activating a referent in current discourse. Similarly, it lies beyond the scope of this introductory article to explore in depth the notion of grounding or contextual identification, where ground is formed by the speech event, its participants and the immediate circumstances around them.Footnote 5
2 Headedness
The syntax of noun phrases has attracted the attention of scholars for decades. From a syntactic perspective, the most controversial issue has perhaps been the characterisation of the head of the noun phrase. As already hinted at in our discussion of the definition of noun phrase in comprehensive grammars, there is less controversy regarding the classification of a given phrasal constituent as either a noun phrase or something else; no consensus exists, however, as to the determination of the head of such a phrase.
From a non-syntax-centred standpoint, the noun is commonly regarded as the head of the noun phrase. In his Cognitive Grammar, Langacker (Reference Langacker2002: 12–13) maintains that the head's profile is the determinant at the composite structural level of the upper constructions. Using more syntactic machinery, Van Langendonck (Reference Van Langendonck1994) stresses the nominal status of the noun phrase, since it is the noun that determines valency relations among arguments and adjuncts – the noun selects the type of adjuncts which are permissible in the noun phrase, the noun licenses genitive ’s, etc. By using typological evidence, Van Langendonck shows that word order in the noun phrase is also determined by the noun. From a functional perspective, Keizer (Reference Keizer2007: 9) considers that the head of a noun phrase is the noun, the ‘most important part of [the] phrase (its central element or nucleus)’, and supports this view by citing features observable in the vast majority of noun phrases: (i) obligatoriness; (ii) distributional equivalence of nouns and noun phrases; (iii) responsibility for subject–verb agreement when the subject is a noun phrase; (iv) carrier of inflection in the noun phrase; (v) stress distribution; and (vi) pronominalisation in the ensuing discourse. When Keizer deals with the mismatches between these features and concrete examples of noun phrases, she often explains the lack of approximation to the prototype by alluding to performance circumstances (e.g. when subject–verb agreement is triggered by linear proximity and not by syntactic facts).
It is in the generative literature that one finds arguments in favour of identifying the nucleus of the noun phrase in constituents other than nouns. In the traditional theory of grammar, the noun phrase (NP) was analysed as a maximal projection derived from a (minimal) noun category. In the NP projection, the Specifier was the locus of such categories as determiners and genitives. The fact that the determiner is a closed category made it unappealing in a position such as Specifier. On the other hand, the generation of full genitive phrases in a Specifier position has been rejected by scholars such as Abney (Reference Abney1987). As a consequence of this, new avenues opened up, in particular the notion that the determiner is the head of the (traditional concept of) noun phrase. Whereas Brame's (Reference Brame1982) study is commonly recognised as marking the shift from a noun-centric to a determiner-centric approach, it is in Abney's (Reference Abney1987) MIT dissertation that the proposal is explored in depth. Abney, elaborating on Fukui & Speas (Reference Fukui and Speas1986), hypothesises that the determiner category is similar to Inflection and ComplementiserFootnote 6 in many respects, and suggests that the theory of grammar would benefit from an analysis which starts with a minimal category noun and which constructs an NP node that is a complement to the determiner (D), the whole constituent becoming a DP. The resemblance between Inflection and DFootnote 7 is given support by the generation of the genitive marker ’s in D, for example, which parallels the analysis of the third-personal singular ending -s under Inflection in an IP. The proposals are reflected in (1) and (2):Footnote 8
(1)
(2)
Alexiadou et al. (Reference Alexiadou, Haegeman and Stavrou2007: 55–6) make further proposals in favour of the analysis of noun phrases as DPs. They claim that the determiner is the bearer of referentiality in the noun phrase and plays a grammaticalising role as far as semantico-pragmatic definiteness is concerned; in their words, the determiner is the ‘syntactic category . . . that is responsible for that part of the semantic interpretation of noun phrases’ (79). From a syntactic perspective, Alexiadou et al. maintain that the determiner is the element that assigns Case to the complements which may occur in the noun phrase and thus acts as a kind of subordinator between the nouns and their complements.
A critical view of the so-called DP hypothesis is van Eynde's (Reference Van Eynde2006), couched in terms of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Van Eynde, after recognising that the DP treatment ‘has the advantage of providing a uniform account of all syntactic categories’ (139), maintains that the proposal is flawed since it is based on the existence of a category, that is, the determiner, for which the grammar cannot provide evidence. In his opinion, (traditional) determiners do not constitute a separate category and must be integrated in the class of adjectives, proforms or pronouns.
A possible solution to this problem of the status of noun phrases can be found in Hudson (Reference Hudson2004), in which the issue of whether determiners are heads or not is reopened, a debate in which Hudson (Reference Hudson1990) and Van Langendonck (Reference Van Langendonck1994) had previously been on opposing sides. Looking at different languages, Hudson cites four facts that he claims show that determiners depend on nouns, and three facts showing the converse. His concluding claim is that ‘either [the determiner or the noun] can be the head of the NP’ (2004: 39) since there exists mutual dependency between both categories in the noun phrase. The implicit assumption is that either (but not both) may be the head of the noun phrase, because the determiner is a kind of noun; more precisely, ‘determiners are pronouns that take common nouns as their complement, and pronouns are a kind of noun’ (2004: 40). Needless to say, this proposal, which may be compatible with Word Grammar, cannot be incorporated into other theoretical frameworks.
As already mentioned, Dryer's (Reference Dryer2004) radical contribution to the question of headedness is cross-linguistic in perspective and is based on a detailed analysis of noun phrases without nouns, traditionally regarded as elliptical. His contention is that, in many cases, nouns should simply be considered one of many possible constituents of noun phrases, without any privileged status as heads over other constituents traditionally regarded as modifiers of the noun. This, together with an exploration of six possible analyses for noun phrases without nouns in various languages, leads him to claim that ‘[i]f there are languages in which noun phrases are headless, even when a noun is present, this raises questions as to whether a similar analysis might be applied to languages in which nouns are obligatory’ (2004: 47).
3 Noun-phrase structure
In this section we will summarise a number of studies which have dealt with the structural slots that are permissible in noun-phrase structure (section 3.1) and with issues such as complexity and word order in the English noun phrase (section 3.2).
3.1 Specifiers, complements and modifiers
Depending on the syntactic (and semantic) connection between the constituents which precede or follow the (head) noun in a noun phrase, they can be classified as either internal or external dependents (Payne & Huddleston Reference Payne and Huddleston2002: 330–1). More specifically, determiners, predeterminers and other pre-head peripheral modifiers (e.g. even in even his house) are taken as external dependents, whereas postmodifiers and complements are regarded as internal dependents. On many occasions, as noted by Egan (Reference Egan2008: 2), the definition of the syntactic relation of complementation, as opposed to modification or determination, is undesirably vague in the literature;Footnote 9 to give an example, Rudanko (Reference Rudanko1989: 2) defines a complement as the constituent ‘marked by the property of being closely connected with the [head]’. Such indeterminacy, together with the fact that the ascription of a dependent to the classes of complement or modifier is difficult in some cases (Herbst et al. Reference Herbst, Heath, Roe, Götz and Klotz2004: xxxiv), motivates the need for semantic and syntactic criteria which can be useful for distinguishing between expanding strategies such as complementation and modification. Briefly, if a dependent is semantically selected or subcategorised by the head category, it will be classified as a complement; in Matthews’ (Reference Matthews2007: 187) words, a complement is ‘[a] unit in a construction either required or specifically taken by an individual member of a lexical category’. By contrast, if the semantic connection between the dependent and the head is loose and, in consequence, the occurrence of the dependent in the phrase is not required by the referent of the head, the dependent will be regarded as a modifier. As already mentioned, the strong semantic link between the complements and the heads is sometimes accompanied by syntactic dependencies such as lexical restrictions, formal determination or syntactic integration. In this vein, prepositional complements of nouns are normally introduced by prepositions which are selected according to their governing heads (e.g. compliance selects a with prepositional phrase), and the syntactic marking of the complements may be based on categorial selection restrictions imposed by the heads (for example, the noun hypothesis commonly select a that-clause as its complement). Apart from these collocation restrictions, which are explicit in contexts of complementation, Matthews (Reference Matthews1981: 124–7) mentions other syntactic factors for the identification of complements, such as the impossibility of dropping (if dropped, the complement is latent) and their exclusion when the pattern is saturated.
Classifications of complements and modifiers capable of occurring in a noun phrase are commonly based on semantic or functional criteria. Keizer (Reference Keizer2007) deals with this in her monograph on the English noun phrase and its linguistic categorisation when she revisits the interaction between the form of noun phrases, their meaning and their use, concluding that communicative, pragmatic and cognitive factors must be considered in order to fully explain the internal structure of noun phrases and utterances. An example of the functional characterisation of the structure of noun phrases in English can be found in Rijkhoff (Reference Rijkhoff2002). Couched in terms of Dik's (Reference Dik1997) Functional Grammar, Rijkhoff's approach favours the grouping of the possible noun-phrase modifiers into three functional semantically driven classes: aspect (determiners), quality (adjectives) and quantification (number, cardinality) modifiers. From a different angle, de Haan offers (in his Reference de Haan1989 monograph and subsequently in his Reference de Haan, Johansson and Stenström1991 paper) a detailed analysis of the various types of clauses that may occur as postmodifiers within the English noun phrase, including their internal structure and the position and function within the sentence that NPs with clausal postmodification may perform. The findings of this corpus study, which puts special emphasis on the variable of text type, show that clausal postmodifiers favour relatively ‘simple’ clause patterns (e.g. SV, SVO and SVC/A). Given that postmodifying clauses are embedded structures, the conclusion to be drawn is that embedded constituents favour relatively simple structures and disfavour complex ones. He goes on to argue that the fact that such a tendency is stronger for those postmodifying clauses occurring in non-final positions in the sentences implies ‘perhaps, that processing more complex structures is made more difficult when they are embedded in the middle of a superordinate structure’ (de Haan Reference de Haan, Johansson and Stenström1991: 54).Footnote 10
As regards complements, Keizer (Reference Keizer2007) applies a number of semantic and syntactic tests to determine the completive or modifying status of a dependent in a noun phrase. As for the former, she mentions the semantic selection restrictions operating in a noun phrase between the noun and its complements (230–1), and the dependency relationship between the semantic roles of the complements and the head noun. As far as the syntactic tests affecting complements are concerned (236–43), she lists the following: ordering restrictions, number of potential complements, scope of anaphora (e.g. one-substitution), coordination mismatches (e.g. *[complement & modifier]), the ungrammaticality of extraposition, and the easiness of wh-preposing evinced by complements. It should be noted here that Keizer contends that nouns do not prototypically take complements since the majority of nouns are non-relational, so the occurrence of complements in a noun phrase is statistically (and semantically) marked. In her words, most nouns ‘denote an entity or set of entities without relating this entity (or set) to any other particular entity (or set of entities)’ (220).
3.2 Complexity and word order
In an attempt either to underline the parallelism between the placement of complements and adjuncts in noun phrases, and in verb phrases and/or clauses, or simply to investigate constituency issues, a number of scholars have focused on word order in the English noun phrase. De Mönnink (Reference de Mönnink2000) has the latter aim, and her analysis of the limits on linear mobility of noun-phrase constituents represents a traditional surface (unlayered) structural corpus-driven description of the word-order configurations of the noun phrase in English (see an adaptation of her figure 1.6 in (3) below). This is reminiscent of Biber et al.'s (Reference Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan1999: 241, 576–7) simple layering of the noun phrase. In what follows we will very briefly mention other accounts which explain word order in the English noun phrase from a more theoretical perspective.
(3)
Rijkhoff (Reference Rijkhoff1990) distinguishes three principles which determine the unmarked word order in noun phrases: (i) domain integrity, according to which ‘constituents prefer to remain within their proper domain’ (9), that is, within the phrase; (ii) head proximity, which explains that ‘[t]he head of a domain tends to be contiguous with the head of the superordinate domain’ (14); and (iii) scope, according to which ‘[a]n operator is expressed in the periphery of the layer it has in its scope’ (21). The application of principle (i) implies that determiners, adjectives and nouns tend to occur together in noun phrases. Principles (ii) and (iii) justify why adjectives prefer to be next to nouns, nouns next to verbs, etc. As Rijkhoff (Reference Rijkhoff1990: 5) points out, these three principles belong to the general iconic principle that ‘what belongs together semantically goes together syntactically’. In his subsequent book, where he undertakes a cross-linguistic account of word-order nominal patterns in 52 languages from the perspective of Dik's (Reference Dik1997) Functional Grammar, Rijkhoff (Reference Rijkhoff2002: 249) adds a new principle, that of Dik's (Reference Dik1997) Language-Independent Preferred Order of Constituents (LIPOC), which requires that the ordering of constituents is of increasing complexity. In this vein, Rijkhoff claims that complexity is determined by the written/spoken polite/familiar nature of language, since there exists ‘a correlation between the pragmatic or discourse function of an NP in a clause on the one hand and its internal complexity on the other’ (25).
In line with this correlation between the function of the NP within the clause and its internal complexity, de Haan (Reference de Haan, Johansson and Stenström1991) and Aarts (Reference Aarts, Sampson and McCarthy2004) examine the distribution of noun phrases containing postmodifying clauses and the distribution of various noun-phrase types, respectively. Regarding the distribution of noun phrases with postmodifying embedded clauses, de Haan (Reference de Haan, Johansson and Stenström1991) found that they are disfavoured in subject positions, whereas they readily occur in other functions. The explanation is in the two conflicting forces that seem to clash here: on the one hand, subject noun phrases tend to occupy non-final positions, while on the other hand, postmodifying clauses (which tend to follow the noun-phrase head immediately) are usually avoided in non-final positions. Along with this, the (syntactic) subject frequently coincides with the (thematic) topic of discussion which in turn tends to contain familiar (given, shared) information, either because it is known from the start or because it has been introduced at a prior stage in the discussion. This means that it is often not necessary for the subject noun phrase to contain much postmodification that helps to identify its referent. Thus, the lightness of subject noun phrases is doubly stimulated by (i) the avoidance of clausal-postmodification in non-final positions, and (ii) the (given) nature of the information which is usually contained in the subject position, which makes it unnecessary for the head noun to be extensively postmodified. In de Haan's (Reference de Haan, Johansson and Stenström1991: 56) words, ‘not only do we not wish to have heavily modified subject noun phrases from a psychological, language processing, point of view, we also do not need heavily modified subject noun phrases from a pragmatic point of view’. Further evidence of the tendency to avoid complexity in embedded positions may be found in the complexity of these postmodifying clauses. De Haan's findings show, in general, that simple postmodifying clauses outnumber complex ones and, more specifically, that the number of complex postmodifying clauses in non-final position is even smaller than that of complex postmodifying clauses in final noun phrases (61).
In his study on the distribution of noun-phrase types in English sentences, Aarts (Reference Aarts, Sampson and McCarthy2004) assesses the hypothesis that there is a correlation between subject position and structural lightness (found in noun phrases made up of pronouns, nouns, names, or determiner + noun, neither pre- nor postmodified) as well as ‘a very strong tendency for non-subject exponents to be realized by structurally “heavy” noun-phrase types’ (35–6). Studying various text types, Aarts finds convincing evidence that noun-phrase types are not randomly distributed over the English sentence. On the contrary, there is a strong association between personal pronouns and subjectness, which implies that, even within the group of ‘light’ NPs, names and pronouns are more typical exponents of subject than noun phrases with a determiner. Premodified noun phrases represent a minority, and their frequency decreases as their complexity increases. Postmodified noun phrases, in turn, typically appear in functions other than subject in all the text types analysed, even if heavy noun-phrase types seem to be more frequent in scientific and formal language than in fiction and informal speech (43).
In a position not far from that of the above-mentioned LIPOC, Hawkins (Reference Hawkins1994, Reference Hawkins2004) bases his performance theory on word-order possibilities ruled by distributional and complexity-based principles. To give an example, the preference for (4) over (4′), below, can be justified in two ways: by alluding to processing facts, and from a syntactic standpoint. First, on processing grounds, Hawkins argues that (4) is better than (4′) because of the amount of structure which has to be processed between the head category and the second dependent.
(4) the author of this book from the capital of Britain [NB the author is from London]
(4′) the author from the capital of Britain of this book
In order that the last constituent in the noun phrase (from the capital of Britain) can be interpreted as a prepositional phrase modifying the head author in (4), the human parser has to process the head noun plus the complement prepositional phrase (of this book) plus the governing category of the postmodifying prepositional phrase (from), that is, four wordsFootnote 11 (of this book from). By contrast, in (4′) the human parser has to process six words (from the capital of Britain of) in order to analyse of this book as a prepositional phrase complementing author.
Second, the so-called syntactic explanation for the preference for (4) over (4′) can also be inspired by Hawkins’ performance theory. He postulates a ‘Minimize Domains’ (or MiD) principle as follows:
Given two or more categories A, B, . . . related by a grammatical rule R of combination and/or dependency, the human processor prefers to minimize the distance between them within the smallest surface structure domain sufficient for the processing of R. (2004: 234)
This dependency relation (or grammatical rule) is close to the concept of complementation described in section 3.1. MiD states that a construction where a head is followed by a complement and the complement is preceded by additional lexical material is not an optimal solution from the point of view of processing. Consequently, MiD explains from a syntactic perspective why (4′) illustrates a distribution which is not plausible.
The generative literature, too, has explored word-order issues affecting the design of noun phrases. Giorgi & Longobardi (Reference Giorgi and Longobardi1991b), for example, discuss the distribution of modifiers, possessive phrases and other NP constituents from a pre-minimalist perspective.
4 From Transactions onwards
Meant to be a ‘meeting of minds between structural theorists and historical functionalists’ (Adamson & González-Díaz Reference Adamson and González-Díaz2009: 257), the recent special issue of Transactions of the Philological Society, edited by Adamson and González-Díaz, comprised a collection of papers on the history and structure of the English noun phrase. The emphasis was on the interconnection between structural and diachronic matters, with the ultimate aim of exploring ways in which the structure of Present-day noun phrases reflect their past history. Although we are not here focusing on diachrony, in what follows we will devote a few lines to a summary of some of the main contributions to the Transactions issue.
The determiner slot, and more specifically the cases of possessives, such and same/other, which are often called postdeterminers and illustrate the area where the category fuzzily borders on the adjective, is the object of Van de Velde's (Reference Van de Velde2009) paper. Taking the diachrony of NP syntax as a vantage point, Van de Velde maintains that ‘there is no need to posit a separate postdeterminer slot’ (318) for what other scholars label postdeterminers (Sinclair et al. Reference Sinclair1990) or ‘precentral’ adjectives (Quirk et al. Reference Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik1985), since such a position is ‘an unnecessary complication of the NP structure’. Possessives, such and same/other are in fact ‘elements undergoing a diachronic transition from adjective slotfiller to determiner slotfiller’ (293), as may be seen in the fact that they all lose adjectival properties to gain determiner properties.
From a formal perspective, Payne (Reference Payne2009) approaches the English phrasal genitive in order to provide a number of arguments that support a morphological analysis for the English genitive, and which argue against a postlexical clitic one (see also Payne, this issue). Such an analysis not only satisfies the constraints imposed by the general typology of double case, but also accounts for Kruisinga's (Reference Kruisinga1932) observation that the English phrasal genitive is incompatible with (regular) plural marking. In Payne's (Reference Payne2009) words:
The presence of the ghost feature in the English phrasal genitive signals to the morphological realization rules on the head that the genitive feature has passed to the edge, and blocks the occurrence of phrasal genitives in which the head is a regular plural. (355)
The diachrony of English noun phrases is also taken as a point of departure in Davidse's (Reference Davidse2009) attempt to validate the hypothetical historical transition of certain premodifying adjectives from identifying into intensifying. Revisiting Bolinger's (Reference Bolinger1972) seminal study of degree words, Davidse studies two of Bolinger's examples, the adjective complete and the noun sort (in the binomial structure Det + sort + of + noun). Her detailed analysis of the transition from the initially descriptive uses of such expressions into their secondary determiner uses and their current noun-intensifying uses leads Davidse to claim that, although there is actually a historical path of change from identifying to intensifying, other multiple, possibly interlocking, paths need to be recognised.
The following two papers in the Transactions issue focus on the premodifier slot of the noun phrase. In the first of these Matthews approaches non-prototypical adjectives which are either attributive-only or never-attributive, trying to match their adjectival nature and the syntactic features and constraints which are prototypical of the adjectival category. His conclusion is that individual adjectival lexemes can have more than one sense, and their syntax may vary from one sense to another, since, as Huddleston & Pullum et al. (Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 553) point out, ‘an attributive adjective has a meaning it cannot have in a predicative function’ (359). Next is a corpus-based study of the behaviour of the adjectives little and old in two-adjective premodifying strings (e.g. good old/little man), in which González-Díaz provides empirical support for Matthews’ claims about the complexity of the noun-phrase internal syntax and the need to explore the ‘micro-syntax’ of attributive adjectives in more depth. Building on Denison's (Reference Denison and Romaine1998) claim that adjective organisation in the English noun phrase is a matter of trends of usage rather than of strict rules, González-Díaz focuses on the need for a careful analysis of ‘how the processes of subjectification map onto the diachrony of complex NPs in English’ (376). After proving that both little and old have developed subjectivised meanings over time, her conclusion is that whenever they appear in the leftmost position of the characterizing slot, their respective absolute (descriptive) readings, i.e. dimension and age, appear to be foregrounded. However, if they appear on the right of the string, their semantic import is more difficult to ascertain. As explained by Adamson (Reference Adamson, Fischer, Rosenbach and Stein2000: 45–6), ‘a position to the right of its neighbour promotes a descriptive reading, a position to the left favours an evaluative reading’, at least in the cases she analyses.
Overall, the special issue of Transactions of the Philological Society may be said to shed significant light on the prenominal area of the noun phrase. Davidse, Van de Velde and Payne's contributions focus on the extensions of the determiner function and the so-called genitive group, while Matthews and González-Díaz explore the synchronic complexity and diachronic instability of the (pre)modifier slot, ‘whose occupants form variable relations with each other and with the determiner on one side and the head noun on the other’ (Adamson & González-Díaz Reference González-Díaz2009: 258).
5 This issue
The present collection, which complements editorial initiatives such as the Transactions special issue, includes a number of theoretical and corpus-based/driven contributions whose earlier versions were presented at the NP1 Workshop ‘Structure of the noun phrase in English: synchronic and diachronic explorations’, held in Vigo in October 2009. In what follows, we offer a summary of the contributions to this volume.
Contrary to the general claim that grammatical innovation emerges in the discourse context of conversational interaction, Douglas Biber & Bethany Gray argue in ‘Grammatical change in the noun phrase: The influence of written language use’ that the communicative demands of any register – whether spoken or written – have the potential to facilitate the emergence of grammatical uses (and possibly new constructions) associated with those communicative needs. To support this view they analyse noun-phrase constructions in a register that differs in almost every way from face-to-face conversation, namely academic research writing. Two case studies are surveyed, each focusing on a particular device used for noun phrase modification: nouns as nominal premodifiers and prepositional phrases as nominal postmodifiers. These construction types were attested in earlier stages of the English language, but they were relatively restricted in function and variability. Biber & Gray show how in the nineteenth and particularly the twentieth century these structures become much more frequent and productive, and undergo major extensions in their uses, functions and range of lexical associations. As for the use of nouns as premodifiers, there has been a large expansion in the types of nouns that can occur as nominal premodifiers, as well as a similar expansion in the range of meaning relationships underlying noun–noun sequences. Additionally, the use of a single noun as a premodifier has been extended to allow two and three premodifying nouns, and this extension seems to be continuing at the present time. Similar extensions in grammatical and semantic function are documented for the use of prepositional phrases as nominal postmodifiers. Thus prepositions introducing nominal postmodifiers show an increasing ability to take ing-clauses as complements and to express abstract meanings that mark the modifying noun as the thematic ‘patient’ of the process described by the head noun. The evidence put forward by the authors indicates that these innovations were all initiated in writing rather than speech, with little transfer to spoken conversational discourse.
Lobke Ghesquière & Kristin Davidse's article ‘The development of intensification scales in noun-intensifying uses of adjectives: Sources, paths and mechanisms of change’ begins with the observation that the noun-intensifying uses of adjectives do not develop only from lexical, property-describing uses, as is generally assumed in current grammaticalisation studies. As pointed out earlier by Bolinger (Reference Bolinger1972), they can also develop from elements in the noun phrase with a more grammatical function, such as adjectives functioning as secondary determiners with either quantifying or identifying meaning in determiner complexes. Nuancing claims by both Paradis (Reference Paradis, Bermúdez-Otero, Denison, Hogg and McCully2000) and Bolinger (Reference Bolinger1972) about the source of noun-intensifying uses of adjectives such as complete and whole, those of complete are shown to have developed from descriptive uses, and those of whole from quantifying-identifying uses. Particular is established as a case in which intensifying uses derived from identifying meanings in the strict sense. Regarding the mechanism of change, the authors argue that Paradis’ (Reference Paradis, Bermúdez-Otero, Denison, Hogg and McCully2000) view, namely that the gradability mode associated with the source use is foregrounded in the intensifying use, is essentially on the right track. However, this hypothesis has to be reformulated so that it also encompasses the two paths with grammatical source meanings. In addition, it has to be explained how adjectives often develop intensifying meanings with scale types not associated with their source uses. The case study of complete identifies two distinct lexical source uses whose bounded/unbounded configuration shifts to closed/open intensification scales in the two intensifying uses. With quantifying sources, as in the case of whole, the shift is argued to involve a semantic reconfiguration of the source meaning, that is, from the measuring of (masses of) instances in terms of absolute or relative quantification to the measuring of the degree of a property in terms of open or closed scales. With identifying sources, e.g. particular, which do not incorporate any grading or measuring mode, it is proposed that pragmatic processes are responsible for the derivation of scalar implicatures which are incorporated as inherent components in the intensifying meaning. Ghesquière & Davidse further suggest that the initial shift takes place in collocational environments shared by source and target use, and maintains the original mode of grading or measuring. This is typically followed by collocational extension, which may invite a different type of degree modification. Such was clearly the case with whole, whose relative quantificational source first led to closed scale-intensifying uses, which in turn extended to open scale-intensifying uses. The collocational histories of the individual adjectives are shown to play an important role in both the types of intensifying meanings developed (as with whole) and the specific path of change followed (as with the different source types of complete and whole).
The article ‘Noun ellipsis in English: Adjectival modifiers and the role of context’ analyses a phenomenon hitherto somewhat underrepresented in the literature, the use of adjectives in elliptical noun phrases in English. In this article Christine Günther addresses the question of when the rather strict requirement of inserting one as the nominal head in anaphoric contexts can be relaxed. Her corpus-based analysis shows that descriptive adjectives occur without nominal heads in English. However, the findings confirm Payne & Huddleston's (Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002) claim that particular types of descriptive adjectives – those denoting ‘basic’ properties – allow for noun ellipsis only partly. Whereas colour adjectives are very prominent among the results in Günther's spoken subcorpus, no generalisations can be drawn for written language. This difference is attributed to the referents of the elliptical noun phrases being physically present in the text-external world. Inherent properties are a better means of identifying a particular referent than speaker-oriented notions. In terms of written language, the use of elliptical noun phrases is determined by contextual factors. Two notions are discussed with respect to their applicability to the analysis, contrast and partitivity. Whereas the concept of partitivity is rejected as a potential factor in the licensing of noun ellipsis, contrast in the sense of phonetic and/or semantic non-identity is argued to be required for elliptical noun phrases. Günther contends that, since the same constraints apply to the use of the semantically empty nominal element one, a contrast condition cannot be taken to account for the differences in distribution. Thus, the focus is shifted towards the properties of one and towards the question of why this element is not required in certain contexts. It is argued that one hosts number morphology and requires a countable antecedent. One can be left out in contexts where a set of referents is delimited and the referents are exhaustively identified as the information expressed on one is retrievable there.
Evelyen Keizer's point of departure in her article ‘English proforms: An alternative account’ is that in most descriptions and analyses of English proforms, the basic assumption is that they correspond to semantic or syntactic units of analysis, that is, clauses, phrases or single words. Keizer's study aims to challenge this assumption and to propose an alternative treatment of English proforms which, unlike previous accounts, can capture all their various uses and functions. Her article focuses on a number of frequently used proforms, including (i) the indefinite pronoun one, (ii) the predicative proform do so, (iii) the demonstrative pronouns that and those, and (iv) certain uses of the personal pronouns we/us and you. The article opens with a detailed discussion of authentic examples from a variety of sources, in order to determine the exact circumstances in which the use of the proforms in question is syntactically, semantically and pragmatically acceptable. It is then argued that what is needed to account for all these uses is a flexible system which allows proforms to replace, or correspond to, combinations of elements that do not form a linguistic unit. Instead, pronouns are defined in terms of two basic functions, one pragmatico-semantic, the other syntactic in nature. Prototypically, proforms exhibit both functions; under clearly definable circumstances, however, the second requirement need not be fulfilled. Subsequently, it is shown that, when formulated within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld & Mackenzie Reference Hengeveld and Mackenzie2008), the approach suggested is also theoretically viable. Keizer argues that if proforms can be defined morphosyntactically at all, this should not be done in terms of substitution, but in terms of the position they take in a morphosyntactic template: in the absence of a lexical element, they fill an obligatory position at clause, phrase or word level. A further advantage of Keizer's approach is that by replacing the substitution criterion by the positional criterion, it becomes applicable to all proforms: definite and indefinite, referential and predicative, phoric and deictic. Given that there are restrictions on which (combinations of) linguistic elements can be replaced by a proform, the article ends with a discussion of possible ways in which the flexible system proposed can be constrained. An attempt is made not only to define some of the restrictions on the use of English proforms, but also to explain the constraints identified.
In their article ‘The Big Mess Construction: Interactions between the lexicon and constructions’, Jong-Bok Kim & Peter Sells investigate so-called Big Mess Constructions (BMC), such as so prominent a punctuation, which are introduced by a limited set of degree words and place an adjectival expression in the predeterminer position of an indefinite NP. Previous analyses explained the properties of this construction by alluding to movement issues, or simply focused on the direct attribution of constructional properties through the special syntactic configuration. This article argues that neither of these two previous perspectives is satisfactory in capturing the variations and flexibility of the BMC within the group of nominal constructions. The approach provided relies on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and follows Van Eynde (Reference Van Eynde and Müller2007) and Kay & Sag (2008) in that degree words are functors which select their heads, but differs from them in that degree expressions can select more than one dependent. The analysis attributes the specific properties of the BMC to the lexical properties of these degree items. More specifically, a degree word like so is first combined with an adjective (so prominent), and then this phrase combines with a following indefinite NP, driven by the specific lexical properties of so. On the other hand, in HPSG extraposition is lexically controlled, and differing lexical properties explain why some degree words can introduce another dependent, as in It was [so] prominent a punctuation in the landscape [that one was positively drawn towards it]. All of these facts suggest that there are not different constructions, but rather, different lexical specifications of the functor words.
In ‘Genitive coordinations with personal pronouns’, John Payne investigates a subtle detail of noun-phrase syntax: the problems which arise in the construction of genitive coordinations with two coordinates, where one or both is a personal pronoun. The investigation is based on examples involving and coordination extracted from the British National Corpus, as well as some non-standard examples taken from the Web. One general finding is that such coordinations are relatively infrequent, and that this can be attributed to difficulties involved in the choice of a suitable form for coordinates headed by pronouns. These difficulties do not arise with non-pronominal coordinates. A novel theoretical analysis is then provided which accounts for the patterns observed, and which serves also as a robust argument in favour of the treatment of the English genitive as a case inflection rather than as a clitic.
In the first main section, Payne examines multiple genitives. These are constructions in which each coordinate is separately marked for genitive case. Multiple genitives of the form NP + Pronoun are easily formed, e.g. [Meg's and my] bedroom. In such constructions, the dependent form of the genitive pronoun is invariably chosen (e.g. my rather than mine). On the other hand, when the coordination takes the form Pronoun + NP, the rules which govern the selection of dependent and independent forms entail that neither form is perfectly suited to function as an initial coordinate. The difficulties which this choice creates result in the pronoun his, which does not differentiate between dependent and independent forms, being by far the most frequent. The analysis of the multiple genitive is relatively straightforward, and invokes the cross-cutting distinction made by Payne & Huddleston (Reference Payne and Huddleston2002) between single and multiple genitives on the one hand, and head and phrasal genitives on the other. In the second main section, single genitives are explored. These are constructions in which only the final coordinate is marked for genitive case. Single genitives in which the first coordinate is a pronoun are rare in the corpus, and the most frequent form is you (e.g. [you and your wife's] bank account). This is attributed to the fact that other pronouns require a choice between nominative and accusative forms, and neither choice is ideal. Most significantly, however, single coordinations of the form NP + Pronoun are not observed at all in the corpus. This is explained by an analysis in which the final coordinate in a single genitive must simultaneously satisfy the condition of being a head genitive, as appropriate to the form of the individual coordinate, and a phrasal genitive, as appropriate to the phrasal status of the coordination as a whole. Ordinary nouns are able to satisfy this condition, but personal pronouns cannot: their head genitive form is typically suppletive, but the phrasal genitive is the regular ’s ending. This analysis requires an interaction between head and phrasal genitives which is morphological in nature, and rules out a clitic analysis of the English genitive of the kind proposed by Anderson (Reference Anderson2005).
In his article ‘Left-peripheral expansion of the English NP’, Freek Van de Velde sets out to show that the English noun phrase has been developing a specialised slot for so-called ‘peripheral modifiers’ over the past centuries. This left-peripheral slot, which precedes the slot for predeterminers such as all and both, contains adverbials expressing interpersonal modification of the noun phrase, as in examples such as unfortunatelya beginner or onlya fool. Van de Velde discusses at length why these adverbs really belong to the noun phrase syntactically, following the account of Payne & Huddleston (Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 436–9), and then traces the diachrony of the construction through in-depth corpus analyses. He shows that peripheral noun-phrase modification is an Early Modern English innovation, due to reanalysis of the semantics and syntax of focus particles, and that later, in the nineteenth century, the slot underwent a rapid extension on different levels. First, at the level of the token, there is an increase in frequency of this optional slot actually being lexically instantiated in the noun phrase. Second, at the type level, a proliferation of the different lexemes is allowed in this construction. The latter type of extension is not only visible in the increasing number of adverbs that are used in the peripheral modifier slot, but also in the increase in the phonetic, morphological and syntactic complexity of the slot fillers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the slot opens up for elements other than one-word adverbials. This extension process is shown to be a result of a series of reanalyses and analogical processes. To account for the diachronic processes involved, Van de Velde follows a constructional, usage-based approach with an onomasiological, rather than a semasiological, perspective on grammaticalisation: rather than tracing the semantic and syntactic changes in a single lexeme (e.g. focus particle even) or a group of lexemes (e.g. focus particles even, also, almost), he looks at the abstract (lexically underspecified) construction of Peripheral NP modification, and asks which elements can occur here. By looking at real historical data and by emphasising the non-discrete, gradual nature of language change, a usage-based account is proposed to analyse emerging syntactic patterns.
Jucker, in the introduction to his (Reference Jucker1993) volume on the noun phrase, regretted that little attention had been paid to this category in comparison to, for example, the verb phrase. In our introduction here we have shown that the post-1993 literature on noun phrases is rich in topics, perspectives and findings and that even now, in 2011, there is room for further investigation on nouns, noun phrases, and their structure and function in clause, discourse(s) and genres. The editors of this special issue, then, hope that the studies collected here will contribute to the greater understanding of the English noun phrase.
