Premodifying -ing participles in the parsed BNC

In this article we will focus on premodifying -ing participles in English. By premodifying -ing participles we refer to NP-internal -ing forms, such as the ones found in a charming man or a barking dog. Our first goal is to see how these participles are used in four registers of Present-Day English: academic prose, newspaper articles, fiction and conversations. Furthermore, we will attempt to find corpus evidence for Vartiainen (forthcoming), where it was suggested that there are solid grounds for dividing the class of premodifying -ing participles into adjectival and verbal -ing participles. Our hypothesis is that if this division is evident in the syntactic behaviour of the participles, then it might also be reflected in the way -ing participles are used in different registers.