A Corpus-Based Study On Noun-phrase Types And Their Syntactic Functions

Noun phrases,as the basic components of all the texts,play a key role in natural language.They always carry and offer a large amount of information in sentences.With the awareness of the vital importance of noun phrases,many studies have been carried out and great progress was made.However,the usages and features of various noun-phrase types and their syntactic functions are complex and problematic for language learners.The author,in this corpus-based study attempts to explore the usages and features of noun-phrase types and their syntactic functions across speech and writing,as well as the associations between them.With the assistance of ICECUP,SPSS and FoxPro programs,the frequencies and proportions of noun-phrase types and their syntactic functions in ICE-GB are quantified and compared.The study shows that the frequencies of noun phrases are higher in speech than those in writing.The proportion of simple noun phrases in speech is larger than that in writing,while the proportion of complex noun phrases is larger in writing than in speech.Besides,the frequencies of noun phrases as subject are higher than those as object and complement,and the frequencies in complement position are higher than in object position.The proportions of direct object,subject and object complement are larger in writing than in speech,while the proportions of indirect object and prepositional complement are larger in speech than in writing.Furthermore,there seems be an association between subject position and simple noun phrases;and for the complex noun phrases,there is an association between object position and all three premodifier + head types and two types of head + postmodifier (H + CL and H + PP),and an association between complement position and other two head + postmodifier types referring to H + AVPO and H + NPPO.