magazinelogo

Translation and Foreign Language Learning

ISSN Online: 3069-0315 ISSN Print: 3070-3077 CODEN:
Frequency: monthly Email: tfll@hillpublish.com
Total View: 373615 Downloads: 93550 Citations: 8 (From Dimensions)
ArticleInterdisciplinary Studies of Translation http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.12.028

A Corpus-based Study on the Features of Noun Phrases in Novels—Based on the ICE-SIN Corpus

Kun Yang

School of Humanities and Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University of Water Resources and Electric Power, Hangzhou 310018, Zhejiang, China.

*Corresponding author: Kun Yang

Published: December 31, 2025

Abstract

In recent years language researchers have become interested in examining types of variation and changes that occur in a particular linguistic system across genres. This study adopts a corpus-based approach to attempt to investigate in depth whether particular linguistic features can serve as reliable indicators for genre identification. Noun phrase type is one kind of linguistic feature that has been selected to conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses for establishing distinctions between genres. Based on the Singapore Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-SIN), this research systematically examines the grammatical variation and distributional features of eight English NP types in Singapore English novels. The findings indicate that the distribution patterns of eight different NP types align with the linguistic characteristics and socio‑communicative functions of the novel genre. Different NP categories can be significant indicators of genres which contributes to revealing the inherent linguistic preferences and stylistic features of narrative discourse in literary works.

Keyword

Noun Phrase; ICE-SIN; Novels; Stylistic Features; Indicator

References

Aarts, F. G. A. M. (1971). On the distribution of noun-phrase types in English clause-structure. Lingua, 26, 281-293.

Ambarita, M. I., Hutahaean, S. W., Munthe, W. S., Kartika, D., & Sitanggang, A. (2023). Contrastive analysis of noun phrase in English and Indonesian on report text "camel" from developing English competencies textbook. International Journal, Corner of Educational Research, (2), 50-56.

Biber, D. (1988). Variations across speech and writing. Cambridge University Press.

Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1994). Sociolinguistic perspectives on register. Oxford University Press.

Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Pearson Education.

Chafe, W., & Danielewicz, J. (1987). Properties of spoken and written language. In R. Horowitz & S. J. Samuels (Eds.), Comprehending oral and written language (pp. 83-113). Academic Press.

de Haan, P. J. M. (1989). Postmodifying clauses in the English noun phrase. Rodopi.

Greenbaum, S. (Ed.). (1996). Comparing English worldwide. Clarendon Press.

Jucker, A. H. (1992). Social stylistics: Syntactic variation in British newspapers. Mouton de Gruyter.

Lu, Y., Wang, L., Wong, D. F., Chao, L. S., & Wang, Y. (2022). Domain adaptation for medical text translation using web resources. In Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (pp. 1-11). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Ni, Y. (1999). A study of the distribution and complexity of NPs in different text-categories in present-day British English [Paper presentation]. The 26th International Systemic Function Congress, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

Parawali, C. S., Bochari, S., Darmawan, D., & Mertosono, S. R. (2024). Cracking the code: Noun phrase complexity in efl student compositions. Modality Journal: International Journal of Linguistics and Literature, 4(2), 115-124.

Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Long-man.

Zhou, X. (2001). Premodifiers of English noun phrases as indicators of genres: A corpus-based study [Master's thesis, National University of Singapore].

Copyright

© 2025 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

How to cite this paper

A Corpus-based Study on the Features of Noun Phrases in Novels—Based on the ICE-SIN Corpus

How to cite this paper: Kun Yang. (2025). A Corpus-based Study on the Features of Noun Phrases in Novels—Based on the ICE-SIN Corpus. Translation and Foreign Language Learning1(5), 911-918.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.12.028