Aarts (1971) is the first scholar who researched the complexity of NPs a style marker. He constructed a corpus of 72,000 words from the Survey of English Usage at University College London. His corpus contains four genres: light fiction, scientific writing, informal speech, and formal spoken and written English.

He found that 'light' NPs are more frequent in subject position and 'heavy' NPs are common in non-subject positions (see Table 5.2).

*Light NPs consist of a simple pronoun, a name, or an unmodified noun with or without a determiner. All other NPs are considered as heavy.

Quirk et al.'s (1985) reprinted table (see Table 5.3) shows the variations among the four genres, with informal speech containing the least and scientific writing the most number of complex NPs. For example, in informal speech, almost two thirds simple NPs are pronouns and names whereas in scientific writing, they comprise a little over one fifth. (Click here to read the whole book chapter.)

A heavily modified noun phrase in the subject position can throw a sentence out of balance and cause problems in comprehension.

Compare the two sentences below. Which one do you find easier to process?

• The noise of a late-lingering flock of wild-geese going out to its day's feeding in the wheat fields woke me the next morning.

― H. L. Davis, The Winds of Morning

• I had an acquaintance whose father became a very rich man in a very brief time through selling very ugly aluminum awning.

― Joseph Epstein, Confessions of a Low Roller

2. The use of NPs in academic writing vs. Non-academic writing (Academic Writing: Nominal Groups)

Which of the two texts sounds more academic, why?

3. Authorial style in the complexity of NPs

The complexity of NPs not only vary across different generes, it also varies among writers of different styles. Raumolin-Brunberg (1991) studies Sir Thomas More's use of NPs. Her findings are summarized in Table 5.6 below.

What conclusions can be drawn on the results displayed in this table? You can compare the data in Table 5.6 with the results on light fiction presented in Table 5.3 above.

Are you interested in finding out the complexity of NPs in a specific writer's texts or how it compares with another writer?