The Syntactic Regularity of English Noun Phrases

Approximately, 10,000 naturally occurring noun phrases taken from the LOB corpus were used firstly, to evaluate the NP component of the Alvey ANLT grammar (Grover et al., 1987, 1989) and secondly, to retest Sampson's (1987a) claim that this data provide evidence for the lack of a clear-cut distinction between grammatical and 'deviant' examples. The examples were sorted and classified on the basis of the lexical and syntactic analysis undertaken as part of the LOB corpus project (Sampson, 1987b). Tokens of each resulting type were parsed using the ANLT grammar and the results analysed to determine the success rate of the parses and the generality of the rules employed.