Nouns as Premodifiers in Newspaper Reporting

Abstract

This bachelor thesis concerns premodifying nouns in British newspaper reporting. The theoretical part at first outlines various types of premodification. The following chapters describe the main characteristics of noun premodification, nominalization and the issue of the fuzzy boundary between noun phrases and nominal compounds. The objective of the thesis is to find out the frequency of premodifying nouns compared to the other types of premodifiers and to identify what nouns occur in premodification most commonly. The practical part is also comprised of a semantic analysis of the meaning relations between the head noun and the premodifying noun.