Whatever the internal organisation of the adjective position, adjectives as a group must precede any nouns used as attributive modifiers: bitter coal strike, not *=W bitter strike. Both bitter and coal are here attributive modifiers - they have a similar function - but there ei no reason to conflate their grammatical categories: coal does not thereby become an adjective. Its distribution is quite different from that of adjectives. If reordering does occur as in (104b), it probably implies a shift of category:

(104) a. Raves coming thick and fast for George Auld's new powerhouse band now at the Arcadia Ballroom, N. Y.

(1942 Melody Maker 4 July 5/4 [OED]) b. The powerhouse new bestseller from ELIZABETH GEORGE

(1996 Bantam Press advertisement, The Guardian p. 1 (3 Feb.))

An overuse of noun modifiers has often been noticed as a feature of journalese - the satirrcal magazine Private Eye llkes to use the spoof headline Shock Row Storm Probe Looms - but in all registers there has probably been a general increase in frequency in recent years. It is common in scientific and engineering English, as in maximum slope conductance-voltage curved see here Varantola (1984). Foster notes the replacement of sexual maniac by sex-maniac (1970: 209). Again there may be dialectal variation: note recent Midwest American frypnn as against more general frjingpan, AmerE airplane as against aeroplan.. (Of course, in several of these instances the N + N syntagms have been lexicalised, so that in PDE the differences are matters of lexis and morphology, not syntax, but the word formation pattern originally depends on the syntactic pattern.)

The modifying noun is usually singular:

/lncN a bill ) , ( dollars ( dollar bill

(105) } worth ten { , ~ a ten - { ,

Y ' a note J ( pounds [ pound note

Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik, having pointed that this holds even for nouns which otherwise have no singular, as in trouserpress, go on to suggest that nevertheless cthe plural attributive construciion is on the increase, particularly in BrE where it is more common than in AmE' [American English]', citing examples like a grants committee (1985: 17.108). We might also compare the aurally identical variation in BrE doll's house vs. AmerE doll house.

3.2.7 Postmodification

Modifiers which follow the head belong to an enormous range of categories: quantifiers, adjectives, prepositional phrases, clauses of various sorts. Quantifiers have already been discussed in section 3.2.4.1, and for postmodifying clauses see section 3.6.

Adjectives tend to follow their head noun or pronoun in certain circumstances detailed by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik (1985: 7.21-2), such as when the head is a compound indefinite pronoun (anyone intelligent,, in certain institutionalised expressions (heir apparent), and when the adjective is coordinated (soldiers timid or cowardly) or has a complement of its own (the boys easiest to teach). In the last case it may be that premodifi-cation is on the increase, as in ready-to-eap piZZas, often when adjective + complement is partially lexicalised.

Prepositional phrases normally post-modify a head (two singers in the front row). Increasingly often, certain PPs can premodify the head noun, especially if they represent wholly or partially lexicalised items (an off-the-wall suggestion.. See here Varantola (1983).

• Syntactic change

The topic of syntactic change in late Modern English is only just beginning to get its share of serious scholarly attention, and compared with the towers of published syntactic research which the Syntax chapters of volumes I-III in this series have been launched from, this chapter has had to rely

• Partitives

It is possible to analyse an NP like a majority of students in two ways: (79) a. head noun majority, premodified by determiner a and Postmodified by the prepositional phrase of students (cf a steak in breadcrumbs) b. head noun students, premodified by complex determiner a majonty of(cf. a few students) For conflicting

• Personifying adverbs

Now the general tendency over the recorded history of English has been for syntactic comparison to expand at the expense of morphological comparison. Elizabethan playwrights, as is well known, frequently used morphological comparison with polysyllabic adjectives which are no longer eligible for it, e. g. beautifulst (c. 1590 Marlowe). Indeed

• The noun phrase

The noun phrase (NP) is the syntactic unit which typically functions as subject or object of a clause or object of a preposition. A pronoun or proper noun usually constitutes a complete noun phrase in itself - he, ,hem, James, Amsterdam - with occasional exceptions like poor old her, you

• Introduction The year 1066 had a resounding impact on the course

Introduction The year 1066 had a resounding impact on the course of English history. William the First, Duke of Normandy, conquered England and took it as a stronghold in his reign. The French rule over England lasted for several centuries and brought about innumerable changes to the English state, language,