The present thesis is devoted to a construction which defies generalisations about the prototypical English noun phrase (NP) to such an extent that it has been termed the Big Mess Construction (Berman 1974). As illustrated by the examples in (1) and (2), the NPs under study involve premodifying adjective phrases (APs) which precede the determiner (always realised in the form of the indefinite article a(n)) rather than following it. (1) NoS had not been hijacked – that was too strong a word. (BNC: CHU 1766) (2) He was prepared for a battle if the porter turned out to be as difficult a customer as his wife. (BNC: CJX 1755) Previous research on the construction is largely limited to contributions from the realms of theoretical syntax and a number of cursory accounts in reference grammars. No comprehensive investigation of its realisations and uses has as yet been conducted. My thesis fills this gap by means of an exhaustive analysis of the construction on the basis of authentic language data retrieved from the British National Corpus (BNC). The corpus-based approach allows me to examine not only the possible but also the most typical uses of the construction. Moreover, while previous work has almost exclusively focused on the formal realisations of the construction, I investigate both its forms and functions. It is demonstrated that, while the construction is remarkably flexible as concerns its possible realisations, its use is governed by probabilistic constraints. For example, some items occur much more frequently inside the degree item slot than others (as, too and so stand out for their particularly high frequency). Contrary to what is assumed in most previous descriptions, the slot is not restricted in its realisation to a fixed number of items. Rather than representing a specialised structure, the construction is furthermore shown to be distributed over a wide range of possible text types and syntactic functions. On the other hand, it is found to be much less typical of spontaneous conversation than of written language; Big Mess NPs further display a strong preference for the function of subject complement. Investigations of the internal structural complexity of the construction indicate that its obligatory components can optionally be enriched by a remarkably wide range of optional (if infrequent) elements. In an additional analysis of the realisations of the obligatory but lexically variable slots (head noun and head of AP), the construction is highlighted to represent a productive pattern. With the help of the methods of Collexeme Analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003) and Co-varying Collexeme Analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004b, Stefanowitsch and Gries 2005), the two slots are, however, revealed to be strongly associated with general nouns and ‘evaluative’ and ‘dimension’ adjectives, respectively. On the basis of an inspection of the most typical adjective-noun combinations, I identify the prototypical semantics of the Big Mess Construction. The analyses of the constructional functions centre on two distinct functional areas. First, I investigate Bolinger’s (1972) hypothesis that the construction fulfils functions in line with the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation (e.g. Selkirk 1984: 11, Schlüter 2005). It is established that rhythmic preferences co-determine the use of the construction to some extent, but that they clearly do not suffice to explain the phenomenon under study. In a next step, the discourse-pragmatic functions of the construction are scrutinised. Big Mess NPs are demonstrated to perform distinct information-structural functions in that the non-canonical position of the AP serves to highlight focal information (compare De Mönnink 2000: 134-35). Additionally, the construction is shown to place emphasis on acts of evaluation. I conclude the construction to represent a contrastive focus construction. My investigations of the formal and functional characteristics of Big Mess NPs each include analyses which compare individual versions of the construction to one another (e.g. the As Big a Mess, Too Big a Mess and So Big a Mess Constructions). It is revealed that the versions are united by a shared core of properties while differing from one another at more abstract levels of description. The question of the status of the constructional versions as separate constructions further receives special emphasis as part of a discussion in which I integrate my results into the framework of usage-based Construction Grammar (e.g. Goldberg 1995, 2006).