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
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