Approximately, 10,000 naturally occurring noun phrases taken from the LOB corpus were used firstly, to evaluate the NP component of the Alvey ANLT grammar (Grover et al., 1987, 1989) and secondly, to retest Sampson's (1987a) claim that this data provide evidence for the lack of a clear-cut distinction between grammatical and 'deviant' examples. The examples were sorted and classified on the basis of the lexical and syntactic analysis undertaken as part of the LOB corpus project (Sampson, 1987b). .
