What a freak paper this is: Noun to adjective transitions of freak in British and American English

Abstract In this paper, I address the question of whether British and American web data pattern in the same way when it comes to attributive freak being used as an adjective or whether one variety is more tolerant towards the item crossing the nominal word class boundary than the other. In order to test this research question, I present a corpus-based analysis of 1,000 random tokens of attributive freak in the British and American sections of the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). Contrary to my hypothesis that American English (AmE) favours noun to adjective transitions of freak over British English (BrE), the findings suggest that BrE is more open to freak crossing the nominal word class boundary than AmE. Further, the study reveals that nominal freak is almost restricted to the use of one to two frequent bigrams, both in BrE and AmE. In all other cases, freak is underdetermined for word-class status but leans towards an adjective interpretation.