The compelling data and analyses in these chapters advance our understanding of the multifaceted nature of grammatical constituents such as the noun phrase. Going beyond the clause-level grammatical properties of NPs, which are by no means uniform across languages, these studies treat some of the language-specific discourse-level conventions of usage found in the languages of the world. At the same time, they demonstrate that talk-in-interaction provides an important source of information about grammatical processing in language use, because online processing exploits and modifies existing and continually emerging constructions.

- Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico,

We knew how noun phrases are structured. This volume for the first time shows how noun phrases are actually used in spoken discourse across a range of languages – and it turns out we also still have a lot to learn about the structure of noun phrases! A rich and thought-provoking collection.

- Bernard Comrie, University of California, Santa Barbara,