STRUCTURE OF MODIFICATION

A.    Noun as Head

Nouns appeared very frequently as heads of structure of modification. The  modifier in such structure may belong to any of four parts of speech. Noun determiners may also be clased as modifier, so the function words may also perform this task.

The most common noun modifier is the adjective, which out – number all the others except determiner in the proposition of two or three in one. When an adjective is the sole modifier of a noun, its position is almost always directly before the noun – between the noun determiner, if there is one and the noun. The structure of this sort are so frequent and well known as hardly to need illustration,

For example ;

barbed wire                                             M : Modifier

    M      H                                                           H : Head

the gloomy room                                     A : Article

 A      M        H                                                   P : Possessive

a great disparity

A  M        H

intense concentration

    M             H

his cheerful smile

 P        M        H

both remarkable tales

  P           M          H

In very rare case, there are adjectives which may come after the noun. This happens under two kinds of circumstances.

a.       In certain fixed phrases, often from technical vocabularies or familiar quotations : court – martial, grace abounding, darkness visible, fee simple.

b.      When the adjective is not a solitary modifier of noun, but part of a larger structure that as a whole acts a noun – modifier :

a figure vague and shadowy

a wish intense beyond belief

a man taller than I thought

Here the adjectives vague, shadowy, intense, and taller are parts of structure which act as unit modifiers of the heads figure, wish, and man.

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B.     Noun Modifier

Noun make up 25% of the single – word modifier of nouns. Except the part called appositive, those nouns come after the noun they modify. The structure of this sort are two kinds. They are :

(a)    Those in which the modifying noun has the possessive inflection, which is (-‘s).

(b)   Those in which it appears in the base form or in the plural inflection, which is (-es).

The upper part sometime called the possessive contruction and another part called adjunct construction. To gain easier understanding, we could try to compare each other by having same noun. Below are some of their examples.

Possessive                                           Noun – Adjunct

child’s play                                          child psychology

a dog’s life                                          the dog days

a day’s work                                       the day shift

my father’s house                                a father image

that woman’s doctor                           that woman doctor

1.      Noun Adjunct and Possessive Noun

From all the examples we put above, last pair shows  probably most vivid difference in the meaning. The formal difference between them maybe described as : a construction with of may be substituted for the possessive construction and the determiner (if there is one) will then go with the modifiying noun.

Aside from it, some other kind of of construction must be substituted for the noun adjunct and the determiner goes with the head noun. Better explanation shows as below.

            my father’s houses      > house of my father

but       that father image         > that image like (a) father

            that woman’s doctor   > doctor of that woman

but       that woman doctor      > that doctor who is woman