History and Structure in the English Noun Phrase: Introduction

Autor: Adamson, S. y González-Díaz, V.

Transactions of the Philological Society, 107 (3)
2009, pp. 255-261
ISSN: 00659746

Esta obra está protegida por el derecho de autor y su reproducción y comunicación pública, en la
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Transactions of the Philological Society Volume 107:3 (2009) 255–261

HISTORY AND STRUCTURE IN THE ENGLISH NOUN

PHRASE: INTRODUCTION

By SYLVIA ADAMSONa and VICTORINA GONZÁLEZ-DÍAZb

a
University of Sheffield; bUniversity of Liverpool

1. CONTEXT
The study of the noun phrase (NP) seems to have been traditionally
less popular than that of the verb phrase and its projection, the
clause. In the last decade, however, developments in syntactic
theory have prompted the appearance of a series of high-profile
monographs and edited collections, which offer new analyses of NP
structure and functions within a variety of theoretical frameworks,
whether typological (Plank 2003), functional (Rijkhoff 2002; Garcı́a
Velasco & Rijkhoff 2008) or generative (Alexiadou, Haegeman &
Stavrou 2007). Most of these studies are cross-linguistic in their
remit and hence focus on the generalisations that can be made
about constituency structure and NP-internal syntax and semantics.
Within these broad areas, inflectional systems, the morphosyntax of
determination, word order and dependency relations have attracted
particular interest.
The English NP has been represented only fitfully in this cross-
linguistic work (it is notable that Plank’s Eurotyp volume, for
instance, avoids using English as one of its case studies), and the
most comprehensive discussions of the structure, use and external
syntax of the English NP in the last decade have been those offered
by the large-scale grammars of Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad &
Finegan (1999) and Huddleston, Pullum et al. (2002).
Language variation across registers and text types is the main
concern of Biber et al.’s Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written
English (1999). As Biber himself notes (pp. 4ff.), the grammar
complements and develops Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik’s
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), by
providing exemplification and robust quantitative backup for its
description of grammatical patterns from the data resources
available in modern large-scale corpora. Like Quirk et al., the
new Longman Grammar aims to be descriptive and theory-neutral,
taking observed differences between written and spoken varieties in
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Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA.
256 TRANSACTIONS OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY 107, 2009

the ‘common core’ of British and American English as its starting

point (1999: 24ff.).
Huddleston & Pullum’s Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language (2002) is more theoretically orientated than either of its
predecessors, showing a preference for formal approaches to
language description and a prevalence of structural criteria over
functional ones when dealing with grammatical categorisation. As
the authors note (p. 19), there is ‘much more discussion of
grammatical concepts and … syntactic argumentation than is
usually found in grammars of English’; and the discussion often
concentrates on issues that have proved to be controversial or have
been understudied in previous grammatical accounts. Nonetheless,
as with Biber et al. and Quirk et al., the Cambridge Grammar is
constrained by its role as a reference grammar and by the general
audience it envisages, both of which prompt it towards single
determinate solutions. This limits its scope for undertaking in-depth
analysis of particular NP-internal functions or their concomitances
and overlaps with formal categories, as well as precluding any
detailed engagement with the semantic complexities of each
linguistic element. Furthermore – and like the cross-linguistic
research mentioned above – none of these large-scale grammars of
English engages in extensive diachronic discussion.
Diachrony has also been largely absent from single-author
monographs on the English NP. The notable exception (which, in
any case, falls outside the decade we are surveying) is Raumolin-
Brunberg (1991). But this study was written before recent develop-
ments in theories of syntactic change and, as Raumolin-Brunberg
declares (1991: 15), it is historical rather than diachronic in its aims,
presenting a photographic still of the state of the NP in one
synchronic language variety rather than tracking its temporal
trajectory (though the author’s comments on the differences in NP
structures between Early Modern and Present-Day English (pp. 273–
8) are insightful and suggestive). The more recent monograph
treatments of the English NP, by de Mönnink (2000) and Keizer
(2007), have largely focused on Present-Day English and have had
more specialised remits. De Mönnink examines the limits on linear
mobility of NP constituents, using evidence from corpora and
elicitation experiments. Keizer’s study, also corpus-based, focuses on
a range of binominal constructions. For a broader coverage, we have
to go back to Jucker’s (1993) The Noun Phrase in English: Its
 ADAMSON AND GONZÁLEZ-DÍAZ – INTRODUCTION 257

Structure and Variability, which is to date perhaps the most

comprehensive collection of articles on the topic and brings together
some of the main researchers and lines of research from the 1980s. In
line with the cross-linguistic work mentioned above, a good number
of the contributions deal with the structure, distribution and semantic
import of determiners and premodifiers (e.g. comparatives, com-
pound adjectives, nouns) in the present day. In addition, some
contributors address general issues of constituent mobility and NP
complexity. An interest in exploring variability across register, text
type and style underlies the treatment of these aspects. In fact, one of
the main aims of the collection is to use modern corpora and corpus
methodology to demonstrate, in Quirk et al.’s words, ‘how sensitive is
the noun phrase as an index of style and how responsive it can be to
the basic purpose and subject matter in varying types of discourse’
(1985: 1351, cited in Jucker 1993: 9).
The present collection complements Jucker’s and reflects new
directions of research in the intervening decade and a half. Like his,
our contributions are mainly corpus-based, focused on the pre-
modifying string and concerned with the behaviour of selected NP
constituents (with special reference to the interaction between syntax
and semantics). Where we differ, as our title indicates, is in the
emphasis our collection places on the interconnection between
structural and diachronic matters. Put differently, we explore the
ways in which present-day NP structure reflects its past history. This
diachronic stance allows us to identify areas of ongoing change in the
NP, and to address some controversial aspects of current syntactic
and semantic models, thus helping to refine standard NP descriptions
and contribute to theory building. We hope to shed new light, in
particular, on synchronic theories of ‘fuzzy’ grammar (Aarts 2007;
Matthews 2007), on diachronic theories of grammaticalisation
(Hopper & Traugott 2003; Trousdale & Traugott forthcoming) and
on the ideas of gradience, indeterminacy and microsyntax that are,
increasingly, common to both. It is in this meeting of minds between
structural theorists and historical functionalists that the distinctive-
ness, timeliness and value of the present collection reside.

2. CONTENTS
Adopting the traditional view that the noun and not the determiner
is the head of the noun phrase, all our contributors work with a
258 TRANSACTIONS OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY 107, 2009

basic structural template for the NP of Determiner—Modifier—

Head—Postmodifier. As David Denison notes, ‘this overall struc-
ture holds good for the whole of our [late Modern English] period,
with significant change confined to the internal structure of the
Determiner position, and to greater freedom for former post-
modifiers to be used in premodification’ (1998: 96). It is these areas
of change that are under special scrutiny here, with two contrib-
utors focusing on extensions of the determiner function and one on
the so-called group genitive, in which, on one analysis, ‘a genitive
ending is added to a postmodifier to create a determiner’ (Quirk
et al. 1985: 328) as in, for example, the King of Spain’s daughter vs
the daughter of the King of Spain or the people I met yesterday’s
house vs the house of the people I met yesterday. The other two
papers explore the synchronic complexity and diachronic instability
of the modifier slot, whose occupants form variable relations with
each other and with the determiner on one side and the head noun
on the other.
In the first paper of the collection, Davidse revisits Bolinger’s
seminal study of degree words (1972) in the light of more recent
research in historical linguistics. Taking two of Bolinger’s examples,
the adjective complete and the noun sort (in the binominal structure
Det + sort + of + N), she asks whether Bolinger’s observation of
synchronic polysemy (as in the contrasts between a complete year
and a complete idiot or what sorts of animal? and what sorta
jerk?) translates into a pathway of historical change identifier >
intensifier, and if so, how that relates to the pathway from
descriptive to intensifying meanings in adjectives, discussed by
Adamson (2000) and Paradis (2000). Using authentic data from a
range of historical corpora unavailable to Bolinger, Davidse is able
to trace the fine detail of the conceptual and categorial shifts
involved in each case as well as ‘the role of collocations and
colligations not only as restricted contexts in which new uses
emerge, but also as patterns persisting over centuries, facilitating
successive shifts’.
Collocational patterns also play an important role in Van de
Velde’s contribution, though in this case the aim is to simplify
rather than complicate current accounts of the prenominal string.
Van de Velde’s focus is again on the determiner slot, which some
grammars (notably Quirk et al. 1985 and Sinclair et al. 1990) have
expanded to include not only a predeterminer slot (occupied by
 ADAMSON AND GONZÁLEZ-DÍAZ – INTRODUCTION 259

items such as both or all) but also a postdeterminer slot, containing

items that do not readily fit into the determiner or adjectival
categories. Van de Velde argues that, although appealing from a
synchronic point of view, this proliferation of slots is not well
motivated diachronically, since the postdeterminer is a mere staging
post for items en route from modifier to determiner status and
hence represents the fuzzy edge between categories rather than a
stable category in its own right.
Payne takes the opportunity to revisit and expand the account
offered in Payne & Huddleston (2002: 479–82) of what Huddleston
had earlier called that ‘very idiosyncratic and troublesome item’ of
English grammar, ‘the possessive ’s of the king’s daughter and the
like’ (Huddleston 1984: 46). Aligning himself with previous cross-
linguistic research on case, Payne argues for a morphological
analysis of the construction (as opposed to a lexical-clitic analysis).
His typologically based approach not only provides a unified
account of the processes of marking assignment but also explains
the variation observed in the external marking of phrasal genitives.
A particularly valuable addition to the earlier discussion in Payne &
Huddleston is the inclusion here of a corpus study, which tests the
predictions of the proposed analysis and gives some indications of
the direction in which the construction is currently developing.
The final two papers both focus on the modifier slot and the
‘central adjectives’ that fill it. Matthews critically examines the
‘micro-syntax’ of attributive adjectives, that is, the functions that
adjectives can perform in complex premodifying strings and the
constructions that they can subsequently form within it. His
investigation shows that stacking (e.g. a [big [red [box]]]),
although widely described as the standard adjective-modification
pattern in grammars of Present-Day English, is only one of the
possible modification relations that an attributive adjective can
enter into. On the basis of prosodic and semantic criteria, he
describes other adjective-modification patterns (as exemplified in
such combinations as tiny little bird, silly old collarbone, dirty great
lorry), his main conclusion being that theoretical generalisations at
a high level of abstraction are adequate insofar as they do not
obscure the recognition of ‘how individual words, with individual
meanings and shades of meaning, can combine with others’. More
radically, he poses the question ‘whether representations of
constituency . . . can add anything to our analysis’.
260 TRANSACTIONS OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY 107, 2009

González-Dı́az explores the diachronic behaviour of two of the

adjectives considered by Matthews, little and old, both of which
have developed subjective meanings over time (as in old boy, little
woman). Her study provides corpus-based support to Matthews’
claims about the variety and the frequent indeterminacy of
attributive-adjective sequences. At the same time, her paper links
back to Davidse’s in its theoretical engagement with the diachronic
processes of grammaticalisation and subjectivisation, and her
findings raise questions for previous synchronic and diachronic
accounts of adjective ordering (notably Dixon 1977 and Adamson
2000).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Earlier versions of the papers that make up this collection were
presented at a Workshop on History and Structure in the English
Noun Phrase, held in Sheffield in April 2008, under the aegis of the
Philological Society. The editors are grateful for the financial
support for this meeting received from the Society and from the
Universities of Sheffield and Liverpool. They would also like to
thank all the workshop participants for much stimulating and
helpful discussion, both at the time and subsequently. Apart from
the present contributors, the participants were Eva Berlage, Tina
Breban, Olga Fischer, Susan Pintzuk, Anette Rosenbach, Lotte
Sommerer and Ann Taylor.

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