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Acknowledgements Many people, in many ways, have helped me to complete this book. I would like to thank them all. My friends, who provided me with the so often sorely needed times of relaxation. My fellow-PhD-students, for sharing and smoothening frustrations and problems on the road. My family, who have always supported me and who have shown great interest in my work. My colleagues, for stimulating discussions and coffee breaks. Special thanks are due to members of the TOSCA team with whom I had the privilege to work: Henk Barkema, Jan Cloeren, Pieter de Haan, and Vera Kamphuis, and most importantly my supervisors Jan Aarts and Nelleke Oostdijk, who introduced me to the fascinating world of syntax and corpus linguistics and who have greatly inspired this work through many discussions and through their comments on this book. I would also like to thank Loe Boves, Martin van ‘t Hof, and Flor Aarts, who read an earlier draft of this book and made valuable comments and suggestions, and Frans van der Slik, who helped me with parts of the statistics. Finally, I would like to thank André Olthof. First of all, for the time and effort he spent in implementing the elicitation program, but secondly, and most importantly, for his unfailing support through the years. Chapter 1 The description of the English noun phrase 1.1 Introduction In this chapter, I discuss the description of the English noun phrase (NP) as it can be found in the modern descriptive tradition, and arrive at an integral description of the NP: the prototypical noun phrase structure. This NP description is implicitly based on the idea that constituents are built up of a continuous sequence of words. However, even in a relatively rigid word order language such as English, constituents have a certain kind of ‘mobility’; they can occur in different positions from the one they typically occupy. Until now little is known about the mobility of phrasal constituents. In this book, I investigate the mobility of immediate constituents of the noun phrase in contemporary British English. At the same time, the study of mobility of constituents in the NP is used as a case study for a multi-method approach to the data. I argue that, from a methodological point of view, descriptive studies improve considerably if they use a multi-method approach to the data. More specifically, if they use a combination of corpus data and experimental data. 1.1.1 English descriptive linguistics English has a long-established tradition of descriptive studies. With the publication of the reference grammars of The Great Tradition at the beginning of this century, there came an end to a long period in which predominantly prescriptive grammars prevailed.1 Unlike their predecessors, grammarians such as Hendrik Poutsma (A Grammar of Late Modern English, 1904-1926), Etsko Kruisinga (A Handbook of Present-day English, 1909-1932) and Otto Jespersen (A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, 1909-1949) focused on the description of the (common core of) the language as evidenced in authentic texts. While the texts were used almost exclusively for the purpose of exemplification, they had an important influence on the descriptive analysis. In the first place, the nature of the data (literary citations) explains the orientation toward written, literary language, which makes up only part of the actual use of language. The degree of variation in structure which they came across was bound to be small. To obtain a fairly complete description, large bodies of text should be studied which contain a great many different varieties of the language, both written and spoken. Secondly, the often dated nature of the texts resulted in descriptions of rather obsolete use. In the third place, traditional grammarians did not (have an adequate method to) study the texts in a systematic manner. They 1 The term ‘The Great