“EGN is a must for anyone who is interested in how general nouns in English are used and/or in linguistic theorising in the light of corpus data. At the descriptive level, Mahlberg has produced an extremely useful book on three particularly important sub-groups of general nouns, i.e. ‘time nouns’, ‘people nouns’ and ‘world nouns’, and she shows by way of exemplification how the corpus-driven approach can be applied to the quantitative and qualitative analysis of corpus data. At the theoretical and methodological level, EGN is both a reflection of and a contribution to general and fundamental points of discussion in corpus-linguistic research, including the status of frequency in corpus research, the understanding of text and context in corpus linguistics, the role of corpus findings in analyses of word classes as prototypical categories and the shared interest of corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics. I hope to have shown that with regard to these four general issues, English general nouns are a very relevant and useful research area. Mahlberg’s book thus comes as a timely and welcome study and it is a good and valuable read.”

“Here is the first detailed empirical study of ‘general nouns’ in English. The book shows how to derive a fresh approach to a thorny problem using the new resources of large text corpora, and it is full of original observations and valuable insights into the workings of a central and difficult area of textual organisation.”

“English General Nouns is a far from simple book, that contains a great deal more than the description of 20 frequently-occurring words. Its sometimes almost cryptic style opens the door to a complexity of thought that demands, but repays, work from its reader. Its topic is no less than how we investigate language in use and the relation between such investigation and language theory.”