Linked Noun Groups

“Michael Pace-Sigge has produced a fascinating, rigorous and at times surprising account of linked noun groups that will become required reading for anyone interested in a corpus-driven description of this phenomenon.”--Michael Hoey, Professor Emeritus, University of Liverpool, UK

 “This book brings a meticulously in-depth focus to the study of how nouns pair with other nouns. What is most laudable and exciting about this book is its contribution to our understanding of these multi-word units in terms of how they differ across spoken and written modes, across specific genres and how they may have changed over time.  It also showcases the importance of the findings for enhanced language description for literary stylistics and language teaching.”—Anne O’Keeffe, Senior Lecturer, Mary Immaculate College, Ireland
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). 
Michael Pace-Sigge is Senior Lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland.