An analysis of the noun phrase modification: the nominal modifier in present-day english culinary recipes

Abstract

Modern English has different structural trends to those found in the spoken and written language of past centuries. Previous studies have proven that, among these trends, written registers with informational and descriptive purposes are becoming more compact and economic in style (BIBER et al., 2009). Consequently, this leads to increase of the noun phrase complexity and the use of nouns and nominals in premodifier position within these texts. The aim of this study is to briefly examine the structural patterns of noun phrases in culinary recipe titles, their modification and the frequency of noun modifiers. To this end, 100 recipe titles from different culinary websites were selected for analysis. The results show that the recipe titles have noun phrases with complex modification and that nouns and nominals as premodifiers have a high frequency, giving rise to several N + N sequences.