Nouns that Appear to Modify Nouns

Instructor Introduction

LING 315: Introduction to Syntax is an exploration of hierarchical and derivational structure in the sentences of human language, and the grammatical systems which generate these sentences. That may sound like a rather dry, arcane topic, but the main tool of the syntactician is insight into the nature of one’s own language behavior, and as such any human who speaks a language is already equipped with this tool – and needs only a little training to begin to make use of it. Scott seemed to understand this immediately, and kept me and our GSI (L.R. “Nik” Nikolai) on our toes all semester with examples and counterexamples and perceptive questions daily. In fact, the now-prize-winning paper that Scott wrote came from a topic we covered in the second week of class – how do we distinguish nouns from adjectives? You would think this would be a settled question, but Scott explores in this paper the grey area between these syntactic categories (i.e., “parts of speech”) in which certain words appear to be adjectives by one set of criteria but nouns by another. In doing so, he draws not only on his native command of English but also his study of Spanish and Mongolian – three typologically dissimilar languages that nonetheless all shed light on the question he considers here. His writing is approachable, with a minimum of technical vocabulary but with a great deal of insight, an excellent command of the syntactician’s toolkit, and with impeccable reasoning and a touch of humor to boot (as seen in his example *The heist on Monday was very bank – which suggests that bank in bank heist is not an adjective, as it cannot appear predicatively).  

— Doug Merchant

Nouns that Appear to Modify Nouns

Nouns and adjectives are two of the most common syntactic categories found in all languages. As a child, in elementary school, we learn the simple definition of adjectives as “words that describe nouns.” Although this appears to be accurate, when we look at adjectives from the perspective of syntax in linguistics, this definition is not satisfactory. Describing something is a very semantic notion, but syntax demands that we be able to identify adjectives by their structure and position in a sentence. Even so, one has to wonder if those elementary definitions aren’t already good enough: isn’t every word that describes a noun an adjective? The answer is no, and we only have to look at the example phrase a chocolate muffin to get an idea of why. In this phrase, chocolate is certainly describing muffin, and so our elementary school selves would instinctively categorize this as an adjective. However, if we take it out of context, chocolate is not an adjective, we all know it to be a noun. In this paper, I want to take a closer look at examples of these “chocolate muffins” and carefully distinguish between different categories of words that appear to be nouns, yet are behaving like adjectives in that they describe other nouns.

First, we need to establish the linguistic definition of an adjective. We can usually identify an adjective in two ways: through its morphological distribution and by its syntactic position in the sentence. Both give greater insight into the definition of an adjective than the semantic definition we introduced previously. Morphologically, adjectives are able to form a comparative and superlative form. Take for example the adjective large, which can become the comparative adjective larger and the superlative adjective largest. All adjectives are able to do this, but some do so by adding the words more and most, such as in the phrase more beautiful and most beautiful. Typically this is done for longer adjectives that have multiple syllables and do not end in -y. This will help us distinguish adjectival modifiers from nominal modifiers moving forward. There are also a number of derivational affixes common to adjectives and nouns that can sometimes give a clue about the syntactic category of the word, but as this is not always the case, I will not discuss that here.

In terms of the syntactic distribution of adjectives in English, the adjective can appear in one of two positions in a sentence. It can appear attributively as part of a noun phrase, appearing before the noun in a sentence, or the adjective can be used predicatively, where it follows the copula be. The first position is well-known and where we generally think of adjectives as appearing in a sentence, such as the cheerful fox. However, when we introduce the copula, we can also see the same phrase in another order: the fox is cheerful. The versatility of the adjective to appear in both forms is another helpful tool in distinguishing between adjectives and nouns in a sentence.

The first example of nouns that appear to be modifying other nouns that I want to address in this paper is the case where a word can be both a noun and an adjective, depending on its use. One example of this is found in the word silver, which can either refer to a color or a metal. In a phrase such as the silver watch, silver may appear to be a nominal modifier, implying that the watch is made of silver, the metal. On the other hand, it may also be the case that the watch is of a silver color, and maybe even made of a different material entirely. This ambiguity of words that can be both an adjective and a noun is the first possible explanation for nouns modifying other nouns.

However, adjectives are not the only modifiers that can appear to modify a noun. Many learners of English are introduced to a very interesting property of noun premodifiers where, if there are multiple premodifiers for a singular noun, they must appear in a specific order. This is the reason why the phrase a big red dog is grammatical, while the phrase a red big dog is (typically) ungrammatical. There are many different breakdowns for which categories and subcategories to distinguish between, but generally the more specific a modifier is to the noun, the closer to the noun it appears (Gómez, 2010, p. 18). This comes into play in an interesting way when distinguishing between adjectival and nominal modifiers as typically nominal modifiers are very specific and appear directly before the noun. Take, for example, the two phrases the silver Swiss watch and the Swiss silver watch. Reading the two phrases aloud, you may even find yourself stressing the words differently. In the first, the word silver would largely be understood as the color of the watch, as it is further away from the noun than the origin of the watch. In the second, silver is more likely the material of the watch, and therefore acting as a nominal modifier. So, another way that we can distinguish between adjectival and nominal modifiers is through modifier ordering.

Now, let us move on from adjectives entirely to dive further into nominal modifiers. Simply put, a nominal modifier is a noun that has the function of modifying another noun. This category of word can refer to nouns that appear before the head of the noun phrase

(premodifying) or after (postmodifying). An example of a premodifying nominal modifier is that stone wall. Gómez notes that nominal modifiers that appear before the head of a phrase denote features of the noun that are permanent (2010, p. 22). This is supported by the rules of premodifier ordering that imply that nominal modifiers are very specific and closely related to the noun they modify. However, the same nominal modifier can be used in a postmodifying position, as in that wall of stone. Note that in this case, a preposition has been added to form this phrase, and in many cases it is possible to turn a premodifying nominal modifier into a postmodifying one in English using “of” or a similar prepositional phrase. Not all postmodifying nominal modifiers are necessarily a part of a prepositional phrase. In Huddleston’s English grammar, examples of noun phrases are shown in the postmodifying position, such as shoes my size or the weather last week (2002, p. 446). These postmodifying noun phrases are limited to, he says, noun phrases of age, size, and similar properties. Although these postmodifying nominal modifiers are not going to feature prominently in the rest of my analysis of nominal modifiers in English, it is worth noting here as many other languages use a postmodifying position for both adjectival and nominal modifiers.

Noun adjuncts are the specific category of most nominal modifiers that appear alone in a premodifying position. The majority of the examples that I encountered of nouns appearing to modify nouns (such as a chocolate muffin) are of this syntactic category. A few commonly used examples include bank heist, chicken soup, and school bus. In each of these examples, the adjunct is inseparable from the identity of the composite noun, as in a school bus is an entirely different bus from other buses. This begins to enter the territory of compound nouns, which we will cover briefly in an upcoming section. But noun adjuncts necessarily follow certain rules where they appear in English. Notably, they cannot undergo the same modifications that the phrases with adjectives did as seen earlier. Take, for instance, the following sentences.

(1)  A bank heist occurred on Monday.

(2)  *The heist on Monday was very bank.

(3)  *It was the bankest heist in recent history.

In sentence 1, bank appears as a noun adjunct modifying the word heist and the result is grammatical. However, we observe that noun adjuncts cannot take a predicative position as shown in sentence 2. In addition, the superlative form bankest is also ungrammatical as bank is not an adjective, it is simply appearing in the same position and performing the same function as an adjectival modifier. This is a very important distinction: that both nouns and adjectives can perform the same function without belonging to the same syntactic category.

Similar to how the meaning of the modifier changed when the order of modifiers was reordered, we can see a similar confusion arise in phrases that use noun adjuncts. For these nominal modifiers, there are many different possible categories for the noun adjunct, ranging from the purpose of a noun to its source or occupation (Muñoz, 2007, p. 5). In a bit of a whimsical example, imagine how the phrase rat poison could be interpreted as both poison intended for rats and also a poison that was created by rats. For a more concrete example of this ambiguity, take the phrase toy factory. This can refer to either a factory that produces toys or a toy that has the appearance of a factory. Just as in the examples with premodifier ordering, this distinction is often accompanied by a difference in intonation when spoken.

Lastly, noun adjuncts are a special form of compound noun, and as such, we should briefly discuss the cases where nouns are the complement of another noun. Gómez refers to such nominal modifiers as being “restrictive modifiers” (2010, p. 41). In this position, these nominal modifiers serve to define a new noun with the noun they modify, such as in the phrase ice cream or in the example she gave of telephone box. The resulting compound noun is nothing like either of its component parts. Compound nouns are also unique in that they can take several forms, not just the one we have just analyzed—the open form—but also a hyphenated and a closed form. Examples of these include bedroom, toothpaste, and mother-in-law. Note that many compound nouns are not always the combination of multiple nouns, but can also be adjectives, verbs and even prepositions. For this reason, I didn’t want to spend too much time identifying compound nouns, but it was necessary to at least address the case where a noun can be part of a compound noun and not just a noun adjunct.

So, when a noun appears to be modifying a noun in English, there are many different syntactic categories that the modifier can take. But, is this true for all languages, are all languages as confusing as English? To briefly analyze this question, I want to compare the function of adjectival and nominal modifiers in both Spanish and Mongolian to see if there are notable differences in the way that this phenomenon appears. I picked these two because they are familiar languages to me and I can speak to the grammaticality of simple sentences and phrases, and they both reveal a unique method of addressing this issue.

In Spanish, both adjectives and nominal modifiers are in the postmodifying position. The majority of modifying nouns that appear in noun phrases are formed using the Spanish prepositions de or para (of and for, in English). For example, water bottle is botella de agua in Spanish. Many other examples where English would use a noun adjunct, Spanish has a dedicated adjectival form. In English, you could point to words like golden as an example where the noun gold has turned into an adjective that means “made of gold.” In Spanish, we see phrases like paz mundial for world peace. The -al suffix appears in many adjectives and might parallel the English suffix -en used for a similar purpose. However, in my quick research, I found that nominal modifiers like the ones in English do still appear in Spanish in phrases like that for junk food which can either be comida basura or comida chatarra. In either case, the two words are both nouns: comida meaning food, and basura meaning trash and chatarra meaning scrap. So, in Spanish, while many nominal modifiers become prepositional phrases in the postmodifying position, there are still some examples that have to appear as nominal modifiers, as in English.

Mongolian is a head-final language, like Japanese or Korean, which means that its modifiers come before its nouns. The same is true of its adjectives. Unlike English, Mongolian uses explicit case endings to distinguish the function of its nouns. This leads to a system where there is no confusion between adjectives and nouns. In English, where there is a noun adjunct, Mongolian uses its genitive case (-ын/-ийн or -ны/ний) to indicate a possession of one noun over another. Examples like chicken soup in English become тахианы шөл, which uses the genitive case -ны to distinguish that it is a “soup of chicken,” to translate roughly. As far as I can tell, all nominal modifiers would take this case in Mongolian, implying that there is no confusion between nominal and adjectival modifiers.

In conclusion, there are many ways in which nouns can appear to modify other nouns. This is largely due to the fact that the function of modifying a noun is entirely separate from the syntactic category of the modifier. These two roles are confused in traditional schooling where adjectives are taught to be words that modify nouns (Huddleston, 2002, p. 537). We saw examples where words could represent both nouns and adjectives, with different meanings. We saw examples of nouns modifying other nouns in both a premodifying and postmodifying position, the latter commonly found in languages like Spanish, especially when used in conjunction with a preposition like de. We saw examples of noun adjuncts which appear in the same position as adjectives but cannot take a predicative or comparative/superlative form. We also saw examples where the noun modifying changed the meaning of the whole noun phrase with compound nouns like ice cream. In short, there are many different ways in which nouns can modify nouns in English, in various ways. In an analysis of Spanish, we found nominal modifiers to be much rarer in noun adjunct form, and in Mongolian noun adjuncts are nonexistent thanks to case markings. I can now confidently identify the chocolate of a chocolate muffin to be a noun adjunct, and even distinguish between many other syntactic categories where nouns appear as a modifier.

Works Cited

Gómez, Iria Pastor. Nominal Modifiers in Noun Phrase Structure: Evidence from Contemporary English. Univ Santiago de Compostela, 2010.

Huddleston, Rodney D., and Geoffrey K. Pullum. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Muñoz, Carmen Portero. “English ‘NOUN + NOUN’ Sequences: their place in Functional Discourse Grammar.” Web Papers in Functional Grammar (WPFG), vol. 80, 2007.