Corpus-Based Study Of The Order Of Premodifiers

Each register has its own language characteristics; such as it distinguishes from other registers, in the aspects of grammar and lexis. This thesis is intended to investigate the order and usage of the premodifiers in news English corpus. Another similar research is also made in the other three corpora—conversation corpus, fiction corpus and academic corpus. A comparison among them is performed.The research is facilitated by the application of computers. Corpora and software are utilized in search of premodifiers and in analyzing the quantitative data. BRILL software has been applied to tag the corpora. FoxPro programs have been applied to process the data provided in the tagged corpora.The finding of the study reveals a number of features of the order of premodifiers: the distribution of the premodifiers of noun phrases is a little difiFerent in different registers; and there is fairly rigid regularity in the order of premodifiers.