Most of our chapters so far have focused on verb constructions, and this might have given the impression that other aspects of English grammar have remained relatively stable. Not so, however. In this chapter we concentrate on the noun phrase, and show that much of interest is happening to this major structure. However, we cannot cover all aspects of the noun phrase in any detail, and so the focus will be on three main topics: parts of speech (especially nouns and noun sequences), the s-genitive versus the of-genitive, and relative clauses. Other topics, such as premodification, will be touched on in passing.

These topics emerged from a combination of bottom-up and top-down thinking. First, the POS tagging of the Brown family of corpora allowed us to compare word class frequencies across the 1961 and 1991/2 corpora, and we were surprised to note an increase in the occurrence of nouns as a very highly significant trend. This led us to narrow down our focus on increasing frequency to particular subclasses and combinations of nouns, hoping thereby to find some pointers to explanation. The high increase of frequency of certain noun classes – especially proper nouns – together with a spectacular increase in s-genitives, noun–noun sequences and acronyms – pointed to an overall pattern of condensation of information in the noun phrase, to which we gave the label ‘densification’.