Blurb:

This chapter examines the methodological implications of approaches to the functional elements of determiner, head and qualifier within the Cardiff Grammar (CG). The CG account of the nominal group has developed an extensive account of the various types of determiner in English and yet there are some descriptive issues that have arisen out of these developments. In this chapter, focusing on the item of, the authors reveal how problematic the assumption of a head element is and argue that shifting the perspective away from headedness leads to different descriptive analyses with very different theoretical implications. Taking a more cognitive approach to of-nominals, the authors show how integrating advances from cognitive linguistics can contribute to a functional account of English complex nominals.