'A nightmare of a trip', 'a gem of a hotel': The study of an evaluative and descriptive frame

This article describes a lexico-grammatical frame which may be exemplified by the phrase ‘a nightmare of a trip’. The internal semantics are a defining feature of the frame: the second noun is likened in some way to the first noun (the ‘trip’ was a ‘nightmare’). By examining many sets of concordance lines generated from the British National Corpus, a database was created containing about 380 examples of the frame. The article describes these phrases from a number of points of view: their internal lexico-semantic structure, male and female reference, communicative functions, and relation to text type.