<p>English noun phrases (NP) which include degree modified adjectives show some interesting variation of the position of the indefinite article. A particularly salient pattern is displayed in <em>This is anticipated to be <strong>more common a scenario</strong> than fleas spreading bubonic plague </em>(BoE, BU-NX022521)<em>.</em> The present paper is based on a study of utterances where this pattern was used even though a canonical word order would have been possible. Such constructs are referred to as the <em>Optional Postposed Indefinite Article Noun Phrase </em>(OPIANP) and have been collected from the British National Corpus (BNC) and <em>Collins Word Banks Online: English Corpus</em> (BoE). The central question is whether there is semantic motivation for this postposition of the indefinite article. The results suggest that there is such motivation, namely that the OPIANP could be an extension of a more frequent construction identified as the <em>Postposed Indefinite Article Noun Phrase</em> (PIANP). Furthermore, it is shown that the pattern’s semantics is unpredictable from the composition of its parts and that its primary function is that it positions already given arguments on an adjectival scale. That is, it foregrounds scalar qualities and backgrounds the noun. These conclusions stem from observations of patterns of unification with other constructions, illustrating how the OPIANP unifies best with the non-referential, descriptive PC-constructions and less well with referential constructions such as the subject and direct object constructions. These findings are remarkable as the idea of an adjective-scalar centred NP-construction challenges the idea of NPs being centred round their head, the noun.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA/oai:DiVA.org:su-40006 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Hillert, Albin |
| Publisher | Stockholm University, Department of English |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, text |
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