English Binominal Noun Phrase

The binomial noun phrase or of-binomial is an important phenomenon in the English language. Defined 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 first 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 N+PP construction continues with the head-classifier and ends with two new of-binominal constructions: the evaluative modifier and binominal intensifier. Comprehensive in its scope it is essential reading for researchers in syntax semantics and English corpus linguistics.