i want to study noun+noun in corpus of English news text, such as the New York times or Reuters, however, i am not sure whether it is worth doing since i am a beginner of corpus. if it is, how can i gain access to the corpus?
You can find many news texts from balanced corpora, such as BNC, ANC, ICE, Penn Treebank Project, etc.
You may also want to build up your own corpus of newspaper texts as there are so many online newspapers freely available.
For Reuters Corpus, Volume 1, English language, 1996-08-20 to 1997-08-19 was released in Nov. 2000. It is distributed on two CDs and contains about 810,000 Reuters, English Language News stories. It requires about 2.5 GB for storage of the uncompressed files.