Linked Noun Groups: Opposition and Expansion as Genre and Style Markers

What is it about?

This book provides a corpus-led analysis of multi-word units (MWUs) in English, specifically fixed pairs of nouns which are linked by a conjunction, such as 'mum and dad', 'bride and groom' and 'law and order'. Crucially, the occurrence pattern of such pairs is dependent on genre, and this book aims to document the structural distribution of some key Linked Noun Groups (LNGs). The author looks at the usage patterns found in a range of poetry and fiction dating from the 17th to 20th century, and also highlights the important role such binomials play in academic English, while acknowledging that they are far less common in casual spoken English. His findings will be highly relevant to students and scholars working in language teaching, stylistics, and language technology (including AI).

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Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash

Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This book deals with a minor yet essential and highly functional grammatical construction in the English language. Unlike established features of grammar—for example, conjugation or morphology—it does not have a single, widely recognised name. Like many other elements of language (see, for example, Bill Louw’s semantic prosody), the occurrence patterns of these constructions can become more visible by the application of corpus linguistics. Often, this construction is found under its general heading—binomials. Within a broad perspective of linguistics, binominal phrases have been of interest only relatively recently. Almost all the literature seems to agree that it was first discussed by Richard Abraham, who talked of fixed coordinates, and highlighted this fixedness with the following example: “we say ‘It’s a matter of life and death’ and ‘It’s a matter of death and life’ although logical enough, cannot be considered colloquial or idiomatic English” (1950, 276).