ABSTRACT |
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 which have considered these
structures as a way of loosing clarity in order to gain brevity and
compactness. However, time has proved these constructions to be
productive devices nowadays. Also controversial is the real status of
N+N structures: are we dealing with compounds and thus with
morphological devices or are N+N structures free syntactic groups? 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 the Brown, Frown, Lob and Flob
corpora of English written texts and related them to three different
variables: genre, speech community and diachrony. A number of criteria
have been applied to the examples obtained, namely, morphosyntactic
(coordination and modification), orthographic, phonological (placement
of stress) 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. The results suggest that some
genres and speech communities are more innovative as regards the use of
N+N structures while others prefer to use those constructions they are
more familiar with.
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