In this presentation, I describe phrases such as a hell of a/an and a bit of a/an, which have an evaluative and/or degree function when they occur in expressions such as A HELL OF A and A BIT OF A. There is a fairly small number of phrases involved, and they may be considered as comprising the pre-nominal frame A ____ OF A/AN. Some other exponents of the frame are ‘a devil of a/an’ and ‘a bugger of a/an’. Many of the prenominal phrases are included as individual items in dictionaries, under the entries for the nouns (BIT, HELL, etc), but the frame which they comprise is not described, presumably because it is difficult to represent grammatical-word-based frames in dictionaries. The presentation reportS on all instances of the frame found in the British National Corpus. Data is given regarding the frequency of the individual phrases, both in the corpus as a whole and in different text types, and the evaluative and/or degree functions involved.

'A bit of a mystery, a hell of a laugh': the study of an evaluative and degree frame

COFFEY, STEPHEN JAMES
2008-01-01

Abstract

In this presentation, I describe phrases such as a hell of a/an and a bit of a/an, which have an evaluative and/or degree function when they occur in expressions such as A HELL OF A and A BIT OF A. There is a fairly small number of phrases involved, and they may be considered as comprising the pre-nominal frame A ____ OF A/AN. Some other exponents of the frame are ‘a devil of a/an’ and ‘a bugger of a/an’. Many of the prenominal phrases are included as individual items in dictionaries, under the entries for the nouns (BIT, HELL, etc), but the frame which they comprise is not described, presumably because it is difficult to represent grammatical-word-based frames in dictionaries. The presentation reportS on all instances of the frame found in the British National Corpus. Data is given regarding the frequency of the individual phrases, both in the corpus as a whole and in different text types, and the evaluative and/or degree functions involved.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11568/125407
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