The 'a _ of a' sequence in modern English

This presentation reports on a study of noun phrases of the type ‘a NOUN of a NOUN’, which may be contrasted with the similar phrasal structure ‘the NOUN of a NOUN’. The overall aim of the research is to compare these two structures. In this particular presentation I have focussed mainly on the ‘a NOUN of a NOUN’ structure, providing data on its frequency and on the meaning relationships between Noun 1 and Noun 2. The data is limited to cases where there is no prenominal modification of the first noun. Data analysis is based on a large number of examples downloaded from the British National Corpus