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disciplinary variation. They found that this pattern is particularly prevalent in lectures (44.0%) as compared to journals (29.3%) and textbooks (26.7%) and they point to a wide disciplinary gap between natural sciences (24.8%) and social sciences (75.2%). In our corpus data, we found an interesting but complex embedment within this type of construction as shown in (4.7).
(4.7) It may take the form of denying the normally expected clues of context and coherence... (EWA-243)
This construction has two of -constructions but within two different embedment. The second of -construction, the normally expected clues of context and coherence, is embedded in the verbal gerund denying, which forms the first of -construction with the form. This type of complex constructions appears to be not uncommon in our corpus, exemplifying a multi-layer embedment within a noun phrase.
The results in Section 4.3 provide a general descriptive statistics for the frequency distribution of the four major types of semantic relations, namely, ‘part-whole’
(24.96%), ‘action’ (22.45%), ‘quality’ (44.61%), and ‘derivative’ (7.97%). It was also showed that the ‘quality’ relation remains to be the most popular type in the of -construction. Yet, if we compare across the sub-categories, ‘objective’ relation is the most popular one (19.87%), followed by ‘attributive’ (13.50%) and ‘topic’
(10.16%). The productivity of the ‘objective’ of -construction is perhaps the signature of academic writing as N1 usually represents nominalization (e.g., discussion from discuss). In the next section, we would like to consider the premodifiers that precede N1 and N2 nominals.
4.4 Premodification
It is common for premodification to take place before the head nouns at both N1 and N2 in the of -construction. However, we do not know if there would be any qualitative or quantitative differences between N1 and N2. First, a quantitative approach was taken to compare the numbers of premodifiers between N1 and N2. The result is illustrated in Figure 4.3.
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69.3%
26.3%
3.7% 0.7%
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28.5%
7.9%
1.7%
0.0%
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20.0%
30.0%
40.0%
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70.0%
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0 1 2 3+
Frequency
Number of premodifiers
N1 N2
Figure 4.3 Frequency of premodifiers preceding N1 and N2
The bar graph shows that similar distribution patterns can be found for the number of premodifiers preceding N1 and N2. Not surprisingly, the number of premodifiers is inversely proportional to its frequency: as the number of premodifiers increases, fewer instances of concordance can be found. Another point to be made is that if we consider N1 and N2 separately, there were 1,508 instances of N1 (30.9%) and 1,864 instances of N2 (38.2%) premodified. In other words, N2 is more likely to be premodified than N1.
As shown in the graph, for those NPs preceded with one premodifier, there are a total of 1,274 instances of N1 (26.2%) and 1,381 instances of N2 (28.4%). This is where the majority of premodification takes place. A plunge in frequency can be seen from the graph as the number of premodifiers is greater than two. For those NPs preceded with two premodifiers, there are merely 180 instances of N1 (3.7%) and 381 instances of N2 (7.8%). The discrepancy between N1 and N2 also widens when the number of premodifiers increases. In brief, we can observe from Figure 4.3 that premodification is more common at N2 when compared to N1.
Next, a further step was taken to investigate the various types of premodifiers. Six types of premodifiers were considered, namely, adjective (e.g., formal, positive), noun
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(e.g., diversity, long-term), participle (e.g., satisfying, centralized), s-genitive (e.g., defendant’s, Picasso’s), adverb (e.g., assertively, logically), and others (e.g., more than twenty, taken-for-granted). However, for the rest of the discussion in this section, we will only focus on those instances with one premodifier. This is because when the number of premodifiers is greater than one, the possible combination of types would be overwhelmingly large to carry out a quantitative analysis as shown here in Figure 4.4. For example, for two premodifiers preceding any head noun, we would get 36 combinations (6x6).
Adjective Noun Participle Genitive-s Adverb Others
Frequency
Types of premodifiers
N1 N2
Figure 4.4 A comparison of types of premodifiers between N1 and N2
Figure 4.4 shows that the proportion of each type of premodifiers varies between N1 and N2. In particular, the frequency of adjective and noun premodifiers diverged. An opposite trend can be found here: there are about 20% more adjectives premodifying N1 and 20% more nouns premodifying N2, indicating a qualitative difference between the two positions. Examples in (4.9) illustrate instances of adjectives premodifying N1 and N2 (with the adjectives shown in bold).
(4.8) a. Can the managers make any precise allocation of time and other resources to planning and defining their operational steps in these amorphous areas? (HPX-761)
b. It also encourages the community to anticipate such changes and so
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litigation, or the expensive, uncertain, and awkward process of legislation. (JXJ-430)
c. In general, the development of a systematic approach to toileting plus rewards for appropriate behaviour can be successful in teaching these children ( Berg et al. (CGT-1898)
d. In 10 of 13 patients with gastric ulcer, tight junctions often exhibited discontinuity and decreased numbers of tight junctional strands, and extensions of apical tight junctional strands to the base of a cell were occasionally seen ( Figs 5B , C ).(HU2-2277)
From the observation of the corpus data, we found that these premodifying adjectives can serve two functions: (1) to provide evaluation as illustrated in (4.8a) and (4.8b), and (2) to provide additional descriptive information as shown in (4.8c) and (4.8d). For the nouns serving as premodifiers, they sometimes co-occur with other premodifying elements as shown in (4.9).
(4.9) a. Fourth, the Western post-war build-up of defence is partially justified in the above terms. (HPX-761)
b. Such mobility in the settlements of the period is most graphically demonstrated by the results of the very large-scale excavations at Mucking (Jones 1979a). (CFK-442)
The word post-war in example (4.9a) and large-scale in (4.9a) exemplify a proportion of adjectival compounds (adjective + noun) which appears to be a heavy load in information packaging. According to Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999), adjectival compounds are more commonly found in writing to avoid the lengthier relative clauses (p. 536). In terms of the s-genitive premodifiers, one of their major functions seems to specify the agent that carries out the action such as Iago’s in Iago’s manipulation of the verbal sign. Although most of these s-genitive premodifiers are animate agents (e.g., Picasso’s dismissal of traditional perspective (GUJ-904), the defendant’s breach of duty (FAU-2162)), there are also a few research related entities (e.g., midwinter’s, the program’s, manufacturing’s). For these latter s-genitive premodifiers, their function has nothing to do with specifying the agent but to specify temporal information (e.g., midwinter’s examination of government data (FR4-50)),
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the instrument (e.g., the program’s static estimate of MyNewPos (FNR-1597)) or the source (e.g., manufacturing’s share of production (G08-460)).