Grammatical Modifier - Premodifiers and Postmodifiers

Premodifiers and Postmodifiers

Modifiers may come either before or after the modified element (the head), depending on the type of modifier and the rules of syntax for the language in question. A modifier placed before the head is called a premodifier; one placed after the head is called a postmodifier.

For example, in land mines, the word land is a premodifier of mines, whereas in the phrase mines in wartime, the phrase in wartime is a postmodifier of mines. A head may have a number of modifiers, and these may include both premodifiers and postmodifiers. For example:

• that nice tall man from Canada that you met

In this noun phrase, man is the head, nice and tall are premodifiers, and from Canada and that you met are postmodifiers.

Notice that in English, simple adjectives are usually used as premodifiers, with occasional exceptions such as galore (which always appears after the noun) and the phrases time immemorial and court martial (the latter comes from French, where most adjectives are postmodifiers). Sometimes placement of the adjective after the noun entails a change of meaning: compare a responsible person and the person responsible, or the proper town (the appropriate town) and the town proper (the area of the town as properly defined).

It is sometimes possible for a modifier to be separated from its head by other words, as in The man came who you bumped into in the street yesterday, where the relative clause who...yesterday is separated from the word it modifies (man) by the word came. This type of situation is especially likely in languages with free word order.