Herds of Wildebeest, Flasks of Vodka, Heaps of Trouble: An Embodied Construction Grammar Approach to English Measure Phrases

1. Introduction In this paper we examine English Measure Phrases (EMPs), for example, herd of zebras, cup of coffee, square of cloth, and miles of beach. 1 Although EMPs internally resemble other phrases of the same form (a noun followed by of followed by a noun phrase), they interact with other elements in the clause in unique ways. On the basis of the phenomena studied in this paper, it will be necessary to distinguish EMPs from other N-of-NP phrases. First, EMPs show unusual modificational patterns. Consider the following corpus examples: (1) The only other colours are provided by a snaking blue-black ribbon of tarmac… (BNC) 2 (2) Ronni blinked down at the glittering sea that was divided from the craggy landscape by a broad silken ribbon of glittering pale gold sand. (BNC) In (1) blue-black is understood as modifying tarmac, not ribbon, which serves instead to specify the dimensional boundaries of the tarmac. In (2) broad refers to the dimension of ribbon, while silken describes a quality of the sand. EMPs also exhibit varying agreement patterns. Consider the following: (3) To ease the pressure, a truckload of Commandos were taken to the rear, where they could relax for a couple of days. (BNC) (4) A herd of zebras, hence, produces, about a quarter to a third of its weight in prey carcasses per year. (BNC) 1 We would like to thank Charles Fillmore, The FrameNet Project, George Lakoff and Jerry Feldman, The Neural Theory of Language Group and Andreas Kathol. 2 For our corpus data we used the British National Corpus (BNC).