Hi Weichang,

If you're using a CQP based interface like CQPWeb for the BNC, you can use a part of speech regular expression to get a rough approximation of NPs. Using the CLAWS tags in the BNC, you could find two lexical NPs after a lexical non-gerund verb like this in CQP:

[pos="VV[^G]?"][pos="AT.*"]?([pos="R.*"]?[pos="J.*"])* [pos="N.*"][pos="(AT|J).*"] ([pos="R.*"]?[pos="J.*"])* [pos="N.*"]

The main trick is avoiding compounds of N+N, which can look like to consecutive NPs. Then you still have to filter out adverbial NPs, such as "eat [lunch] [every day]", but you can sample a subset to establish how frequent those are in your data. Either way, you won't get a perfect result, but a pretty good one.

If you have COCA in a CQP interface you could do something similar, depending on whether you're using COCA's tagset or re-tag it using some other tagset (Penn or CLAWS, for example).

Hope this helps,

Amir

Hi Weichang,

for searching ditransitive constructions on COCA you may adapt the following formula:

[v] [pp*] [a*] [n]

[v] allows for all forms of the verb, pp* searches for all definite pronouns, a* searches for articles and n searches for all nouns.   

Hope this helps, 

Mariana