Geoff, thanks for sending the article link. My ESOL students puzzle about
why noun-modifiers are singular.

What English lacks is a good general word for all modifiers of nouns.
Currently, and confusingly, we use "adjective" in two senses. First there
are the "pure" adjectives, modifiers like "happy" and "bold," most of which
take comparative and superlative forms. But we also use "adjective" in a
more general sense (as Metcalf did in the article) as a catchall for all
modifiers of nouns, so that articles, demonstratives, pure adjectives,
nouns-modifying-nouns, and prepositional phrases are also called
adjectives.

Too bad there isn't a widely used general term. A good candidate might be
"adnominal," since it nicely parallels "adverbial." Then we could restrict
"adjective" to just the pure adjectives. We could say, "Nouns can be
modified by a variety of adnominals. Among them, determiners, adjectives,
and noun-modifiers all precede nouns (in that relative order), while
prepositional phrases usually follow them."

By the way, noun-modifiers (and is there a better name for nouns that
modify nouns?) can themselves be modified, which leads to some interesting
ambiguities: "Dick Veit dusted off his dirty book shelf."

Dick


On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 8:39 AM, Geoffrey Layton <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

>  What happens when nouns become adjectives
>
>
> http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/07/27/the-murmuring-of-innumerate-nouns/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
>
> Geoff Layton
>
>

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