While advances in corpus technology have allowed us to go heyond CGEL in important ways—particularly in the exemplification and quantitative investigation of grammar across different language varieties, spoken and written— CGEVs attention to de(ail and comprehensive coverage is something to which this grammar does not attempt to aspire. In many ways, the two grammars complement rather than compete with each other | 256 NOUNS PRONOUNS AND THE SIMPLE NOUN PHRASE Plural species noun singular noun Thieves tended to target certain types of car he said news For these kinds of question it is necessary that the marked cell populations differ in the expression of the gene. acad There is a close relationship between species nouns and determiners. Singular countable nouns appear to behave like uncountables in these expressions. The determiner preceding the species noun occasionally agrees with the noun in the of-phrase rather than with the species noun as in these kind of people . See also . Species nouns distribution CORPUS FINDINGS 2 Species nouns are distributed quite differently across registers. With the exception of sorl s and the singular form kind species nouns are far more common in academic prose than in the other registers. Table Distribution of species nouns occurrences per million words each represents 20 represents less than 10 CONV FICT NEWS ACAD sort a a BBBBBBBBBB BBB sorts a B kind bbb BBBBBBB kinds B type a B BB BBBBBBBBBB types 0 BBBBBBBBBB species C BB DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS The higher frequency of species nouns in academic prose occurs because classification is an important aspect of academic procedure and discourse. Sort of and kind of in conversation and fiction have somewhat different functions from those in academic prose. They may be part of a question designed to establish the precise type of something being referred to What sort of little silver thing is it conv But very often rather than serving the purposes of exact definition these forms introduce greater vagueness cf. It s a very difficult sort of situation. coNvf There s a kind of mystery here wasn t there conv She loves doing this kind of thing doesn t she conv j A silly sort of drink really fict Goodness knows what sort of state his feet were in. fict Types of nouns 257 There must be something some kind of hint or memory fict His eyes had a kind of icy brilliance about them .
