stage | Grammatical structure | Examples in my corpus | Mean Statistics in this corpus |
2 | Attributive adjectives | The most significant change | 56.2 |
Participle pre-modifiers | A badly burned face | 9.3 | |
Relative clauses | Images [that signal the distress of our global environment] | 4.9 | |
3 | Nouns as pre-modifiers | The north polar cap | 47.8 |
Possessive noun as pre-modifiers | One country’s emissions | 7.5 | |
Of phrase (concrete/locative meanings) | A twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating | 4.3 | |
Prepositions as noun post-modifiers other than of (concrete/locative meanings) | A conflict in one of three different categories, | 4.6 | |
4 | -ed participle as post-modifiers | The horizon defined by little hummocks, | 6.4 |
-ing participle as post-modifiers | Those countries producing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible | 2.1 | |
Attributive adjectives, nouns as pre-modifiers | The polar regions | 11.2 | |
Of phrase (abstract meanings) | The bright lights of civilization | 17.9 | |
Prepositions as noun post-modifiers other than of (abstract meanings) | My search/for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis | 13.9 | |
5 | Preposition + non-finite complement clause | With the sun glaring at midnight | 2.5 |
Complement clauses controlled by nouns | The one that began with the industrial revolution early in the last century | 0.3 | |
Multiple prepositional phrases as post-modifiers, with levels of embedding | In a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. | 21.3 |