Compound nominal predicate in the publicistic style (on the material of the British online news resources)

Abstract

This article examines the compound nominal predicate in the modern English language for determination of its most commonly used structural components – copulative verbs and copular (nominal) part (copular components) in the publicistic style. A brief review is given on the compound nominal predicate, literary speech style, publicistic speech style, degree of development of the problem. The research material is comprised of the British online news resources – BBC News and The Guardian. The texts of news articles on various topics were selected for the period from January 2020 to January 2021. The scope of research material contains 60,000 words. Attention is focused on the copulative verbs, such as appear, become, get, go, grow, feel, keep, look, prove, remain, seem, sound. On the examples from texts, the author demonstrates the application of the listed copulative verbs in line with various copular components in the compound nominal predicate. The obtained results allow concluding that in the publicistic text, the most common copulative verbs in the compound nominal predicate are: become, remain, get, feel; the most common copular component in the compound nominal predicate is the adjective, noun, participle and dependent clause.