Unit 7: The Structure of Noun Phrases
(Comments on Activities)
modifiers |
head |
qualifier |
An |
to Functional Grammar | |
Confessions |
of an Opium Eater | |
a |
Passage |
to India |
The |
verse |
|
Singapore's growing |
||
cardigan |
||
The current government's |
on wage determination | |
Young |
persons |
Numeral or quantifier. |
Head | |||
two |
white |
carrier-bags | ||
the |
definitive wafer thin after dinner |
|||
all |
those |
dreary grammar |
?grammar books | |
the |
perfect Portuguese |
red | ||
most |
retired university |
professors | ||
|
a |
quite a few few |
old half-eaten celery |
stalks | |
a |
most attractive country |
residence | ||
her |
recently published 620th romantic |
novel |
two old white carrier-bags
the definitive wafer thin Swiss after dinner mint
all those dreary incomprehensible grammar books
the perfect ?organic Portuguese ?organic red
most expatriate retired university professors
quite a few old yellow half-eaten celery stalks
a most attractive 6-bedroomed country residence
her gripping recently published 620th romantic novel
Further remarks on Activities 2 and 3
1. old is normally gradable, and often subjective and evaluative. It would tend to come before a colour adjective, but after any adjectives which are even more subjective and evaluative, e.g. a stupid old man. The hyphen in carrier-bags is a clear sign that this is a compound, but not all compounds are necessarily hyphenated.
2. Geographical adjectives generally have a classifying function. But a Swiss mint is not as readily identifiable as a class as an after dinner mint. wafer thin is clearly one adjectival element: wafer submodifies thin. Similar examples would be sky blue or dog tired, and the underlying meaning seems to be 'as adj as a noun'. See below for more remarks on compounds.
3. dreary seems to be more evaluative than incomprehensible. Grammar books may be a compound.
4. Either there are organic wines, some of which are Portuguese, or Portuguese wines, some of which are organic. Take your choice. The wider context would determine which you want.
5. The order given above suggests that the professors retired first and then went abroad. If they were already abroad when they retired, we would probably say: Most retired expatriate university professors.
6. Colour adjectives tend to come between the gradable ones and the classifying ones. Most grammar books class a few as a two-word quantifier. This means that both words go into the quantifier slot. Moreover, it is submodified by quite, which therefore also needs to go into that slot. A lot of is a similar case. If you have classified quite as predeterminer, with a and few in adjacent slots, that would be understandable, but not right here.
7. Noun modifiers tend to come last, so country follows 6-bedroomed. Note that the function of most here is quite different from its function in 5. Here it forms the superlative of the adjectival modifier. In 5 it is a quantifier.
8. gripping is obviously highly subjective. Notice here, though, that the words recently published force themselves to the front of this phrase. It might even be possible to place gripping after them. This is because they do not classify the novel as a type but give extra information. The concept of a 620th recently published novel is hard to grasp.
Some further points should be noted. First, the process of classification referred to above reaches its most precise limit when two words are fully compounded. The criteria for deciding on whether two words form a compound or not are tricky, but one common test is interruptability. If it is possible to insert another element between the two words, then it is not generally regarded as a compound. Swiss mint is clearly interruptable. What about after dinner mint? This seems much harder to interrupt, and we may decide that it is a compound. Speakers' intuitions about whether something like after dinner mint is an integral concept tend to vary, but they may be a useful guide. The interruptability test is itself open to question. Celery stalks seems barely interruptable, but do we want to include cabbage stalks, cauliflower stalks etc. as compounds? Needless to say, compounds enter and leave the language with great regularity, and it would be difficult for a dictionary to keep up with all of them.
Another point is that you may have inserted the additional words in other places for good reasons. Speakers can achieve unexpected meanings by manipulating the order of modifiers. Attempts to set up specific categories of modifiers are probably less useful than getting a feel for the general principles which underlie the ordering.
Finally, do not forget that all these multi-modifier noun phrases are exceedingly untypical. They are all invented for the purpose of illustrating some principles. Searching the corpus for real examples is an unprofitable exercise.
modifiers |
head |
qualifier |
season |
h (conj.) m h of mists and mellow fruitfulness | |
a |
house |
prep m h on the riviera |
the old |
cottages |
prep m h across the street |
his long |
story |
prep m m h q prep h about some obscure ancestor in NZ |
the |
concert |
tomorrow |
that big energetic Scottish |
full-back |
prep m h in the lounge |
1. When he retired he bought a house on the riviera.
2. The old cottages across the street will be demolished soon.
3. His long story about some obscure ancestor in New Zealand bored us to death.
4. The concert tomorrow will be entirely choral.
5. That big energetic Scottish full-back in the lounge can fairly move.
This activity revises instant identification of noun phrases. Consider each of the following as an entire item and say whether it is a noun phrase or some other type of structure.
1. The dish ran away with the spoon.
A clause and a sentence.
2. A tasty dish to set before a king.
A noun phrase. It could be subject, object or complement in a clause. In the nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence it is a complement in the clause:
P S C
Wasn't | that | a tasty dish to set before a king?
The non-finite clause to set before a king is the qualifier element of the phrase.
3. A noun phrase. The most probable structure is:
m |
m |
h |
|
adjective |
adjective |
m + h |
|
good |
old |
adjective + noun | |
Yellow |
Pages | ||
Yellow Pages is a trade name - they are not simply pages which happen to be yellow. If they were, yellow would be another modifier alongside good and old. In this case, we are probably more justified in treating Yellow as part of the head. Within that head, there is a further m + h structure.
4. This would only be a noun phrase if we could find a plausible clause in which it could function as subject, object, complement or prepositional object in a prepositional phrase. It is not easy to do this. Most invented examples do not sound very convincing:
? Roadworks ahead will cause delays.
? We were held up by roadworks ahead.
? It's about time they finished the roadworks ahead.
It is much easier to put these two words into a clause where roadworks is the object and ahead an adjunct:
There are roadworks ahead.
Can you see roadworks ahead?
This suggests that Roadworks ahead is actually a truncated clause rather than a noun phrase. This fits in with the informational value of the words.
5. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.
A noun phrase. Season is h and of mists and mellow fruitfulness is q.
6. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
A sentence. It consists of two principal clauses, one Free and one Bound, non-finite. There is then a third clause inside the second clause: on which etc.
7. An indistinct daguerrotype of Rudolph Virag and his father Leopold Virag executed in the year 1852 in the portrait atelier of their (respectively) 1st and 2nd cousin, Stefan Virag of Szesfehervar, Hungary.
A noun phrase. The h is daguerrotype. Everything after that is q. The structure of the q element is obviously very complex, and we shall not analyse it here!
8. As not as calamitous as a cataclysmic annihilation of the planet in consequence of collision with a dark sun.
An adjectival phrase. The introductory words as not as calamitous as are clearly not of a kind which function as determiners or modifiers in a noun phrase. Nor can they be the head, since none of them are nouns. The whole structure could function as adjectival complement in a clause, but not as subject or as object.
Notice that despite its non-clausal status it appears between capital letter and full-stop. Examples 6,7 and 8 are all from James Joyce's Ulysses, which is an interesting place to search for marked use of different grammatical constituents.
9. h q
Thou who didst waken etc.
A noun phrase. Shelley addresses the West Wind directly. Thou is a pronoun which is then qualified at great length. The strategy is repeated over and over again. The basic clause structure of the first half of the poem is S P, in which S is a repeated use of Thou + q, and S is the imperative verb hear.
