Introduction 1 Syntactic categories In some traditional grammatical approaches such as that embodied in the National Literacy Strategy for primary schools in England, adjectives are "words which qualify nouns" (anon. 1998:34). (In fact even the with-phrase in the girl with long hair is called an Adjective Phrase in the original version of the NLS Glossary, 1998:85.) 2 It is clear too that a modifying noun is regarded as an adjective. Consider (1), noticed on the side of some Vancouver ambulances: (1) Advanced Life Support Unit Although (1) seems straight out of Douglas Adams or Steven Spielberg, it isn't the bracketing that is relevant here but the categories. Anyone relying on the original NLS documentation, which has a poor definition of Adjective and little conception of structure, would have to find three adjectives in (1). Now Rodney Huddleston (1984:93-5, 325-8), for example, shows that this is a wrong-headed analysis which confuses form class, to be defined by a basket of properties, with function, and ever since I first read his book many years ago I have subscribed to that careful structuralist view: a modifying noun remains a noun. I will return to the distinction between adjectives and nouns. This paper concerns the boundaries between word classes and the consequences for syntactic analysis. I will claim that treatments of word classes, in linguistics as much as in the traditional view, are often inadequate, in particular by showing that certain individual words and constructions defy simple categorisation and analysis. The focus throughout is on recent change in English, and synchronic analysis is harnessed to diachronic explanation.

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Variation and change in relativization strategies are well documented. Previous studies have looked at issues such as (a) relativizer choice with respect to the semantics of the antecedent and type of relative, (b) prescriptive traditions, (c) variation across text types and regional varieties, and (d) the role that relative clauses play in the organization of information within the noun phrase.In this article, our focus is on scientific writing in British and American English. The addition of American scientific texts to the ARCHER corpus gives us the opportunity to compare scientific discourse in the two national varieties of English over the whole Late Modern period. Furthermore, ARCHER has been parsed, and this kind of syntactic annotation facilitates the retrieval of information that was previously difficult to obtain. We take advantage of new data and annotation to investigate two largely unrelated topics: relativizer choice and textual organization within the NP.First, parsing facilitates easy retrieval of relative clauses which were previously difficult to retrieve from plain-text corpora by automatic means, namely that-and zero relatives. We study the diachronic change in relativizer choice in British and American scientific writing over the last three hundred years; we also test for the accuracy of the automatically retrieved data. In addition, we trace the development of the prescriptive aversion to which in restrictive relatives (largely peculiar to American English).Second, the parsed data allow us to investigate development in the structure of the NP in this genre, including not only phrasal but also clausal modification of the head noun. We examine the contribution of relative clauses to NP complexity, sentence length and structure. Structural changes within the NP, we argue, are related to the increased professionalization of the scientific publication process.