The English Binominal Noun Phrase by Elnora ten Wolde - 9781108926164

Cambridge University Press

The English Binominal Noun PhraseA Cognitive-Functional Approach\nAuthor(s): Elnora ten Wolde\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9781108926164, 978-1108926164\nSynopsis\nThe binomial noun phrase, or of-binomial, is an important phenomenon in the English language. De?ned as a noun phrase that contains two related nouns, linked by the preposition of, examples include a hell of a day and a beast of a storm. This pioneering book provides the ?rst extensive study of the evaluative binominal noun phrases (EBNP) in English, exploring the syntactic rules that govern them, and the (functional) semantic and pragmatic links between the two nouns. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, corpus data, and two different theoretical approaches (Construction Grammar and Functional Discourse Grammar), it argues that the EBNP now functions as a stage in a grammaticalization path that begins with a prototypical.