ABSTRACT
The English language contains many different parts-of-speech, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and pronouns. Although each part-of-speech has a different function, an interesting question is whether or not different parts-of-speech pattern together, tending to occur frequently in the same texts. In particular, this chapter looks at whether or not nouns and verbs – two of the most common parts-of-speech in any language – tend to occur together in a corpus of American letters to the editor. After the corpus of texts has been tagged, the frequency of a part-of-speech can be easily counted using any basic corpus analysis tool or even many text editors, all of which can be freely downloaded online. In most tag sets noun tags begin with an 'N', while verb tags begin with a 'V', as you would expect, although most taggers will make additional distinctions, such as using the tag 'VBD' for past tense verbs.
