Noun phrases in news reports in Serbian: words tightly packed

Abstract

News reports belong to a register that strives to provide the reader with as much information as possible packed into as little space as possible. In order to achieve these competing goals, the texts tend to rely on structural resources which are particularly suitable to express their content most economically. Studies have shown that newspaper texts in English are especially prone to pack their content into integrated noun phrase constructions, heavily modified with both pre- and post-head elements. What could be expressed in a number of separate sentences is compressed into highly complex noun phrases, predominantly featuring appositive structures and relative clauses as post-modifiers, and nouns and noun phrases as pre-modifiers. This small-scale research seeks to demonstrate that newspaper texts in Serbian resemble those in English in their frequent recourse to tightly packed noun phrases. Although it is reasonable to expect that, owing to their structural differences, the two languages will at times differ in the exact ways in which they set out to accomplish these tasks, the end result is consistent with the assumption that both readily exploit the potential of heavily modified noun phrases in informational registers such as news reporting.