On the Move: The Mobility of Constituents in the English Noun Phrase: A Multi-Method Approach

This book should be seen mainly as a contribution to the long-standing tradition of English descriptive linguistics. It gives a complete account of the nature and frequency of possible noun phrase (NP) structures in contemporary British English, including the ones that deviate from the prototypical description we find in handbooks of English. The book focuses on those NPs which are characterized by the fact that one or more of the constituents is not in its prototypical position, but has moved. The detailed description of variant NPs is obtained through the careful combination of corpus data and experimental data. The book addresses the question how corpus data can be combined with intuitive data and offers a practical approach to the task: the multi-method approach. In this approach, corpus data are combined with intuitive data obtained from native speakers in an elicitation experiment.