Aarts, Bas; Wallis, Sean; (2014) Noun phrase simplicity in spoken English. In: Veselovská, Ludmila and Janebová, Markéta, (eds.) Complex Visibles Out There: Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2014: Language Use and Linguistic Structure. (pp. 501-512). Palacký University: Olomouc, Czech Republic.

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Abstract

In this paper we show how a parsed corpus of English (the British Component of the International Corpus of English; ICE-GB) allows researchers to investigate aspects of the syntactic make-up of noun phrases in spoken and written English with a high degree of precision. We revisit Miller and Weinert’s (1998) study of simple NPs, which was conducted on small samples, by comparing their results against those obtained from ICE-GB. As we have many more categories of text to examine, we are able to demonstrate that the frequency of simple NPs distributes text categories of speech and writing along an overlapping continuum. We conclude that the grammar of speech and writing is distinguishable both quantitatively and qualitatively, but, at least with regard to NP structure, positing two different grammars is not warranted.

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