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Modifiers in english language .pre modifiers and post modifiers
Typology: Essays (university)
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Kurdistan regional government Ministry of higher education and scientific research University of raparin-qaladze College of education English department
By-Lavin Sherko Ahmed Supervisor:- Dr. Salih Ibrahim Date- June/14/
In grammar, a modifier is an optional element in phrase structure or clause structure.[1] A modifier is so called because it is said to modify (change the meaning of) another element in the structure, on which it is dependent. Typically the modifier can be removed without affecting the grammar of the sentence. For example, in the English sentence This is a red ball, the adjective red is a modifier, modifying the noun ball. Removal of the modifier would leave This is a ball, which is grammatically correct and equivalent in structure to the original sentence.
Notice that in English, simple adjectives are usually used as premodifiers, with occasional exceptions such as galore (which always appears after the noun) or the adjectives immemorial and martial in 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.
The two principal types of modifiers are adjectives (and adjectival phrases and adjectival clauses), which modify nouns; and adverbs (and adverbial phrases and adverbial clauses), which modify other parts of speech, particularly verbs, adjectives and other adverbs, as well as whole
phrases or clauses. (Not all adjectives and adverbs are necessarily modifiers, however; an adjective will normally be considered a modifier when used attributively, but not when used predicatively – compare the examples with the adjective red at the start of this article.) Another type of modifier in some languages, including English, is the noun adjunct, which is a noun modifying another noun (or occasionally another part of speech). An example is land in the phrase land mines given above. Examples of the above types of modifiers, in English, are given below. It was [a nice house]. (adjective modifying a noun, in a noun phrase) [The swiftly flowing waters] carried it away. (adjectival phrase, in this case a participial phrase, modifying a noun in a noun phrase) She's [the woman with the hat]. (adjectival phrase, in this case a prepositional phrase, modifying a noun in a noun phrase) I saw [the man whom we met yesterday]. (adjectival clause, in this case a relative clause, modifying a noun in a noun phrase)
A modifier is a word, phrase, or clause which functions as an adjective or an adverb to describe a word or make its meaning more specific. A working definition for the word “modify” is to change or to alter something. This definition is the same when considering the purpose of modifiers within a sentence.
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