When my first English-usage book was published in 2004, I was gratified that it received generally positive reviews and appreciative reader feedback. I was therefore thrown off-balance when this provocative question came by e-mail a few weeks after the book came off the press: “We are always told that in constructing a noun phrase, an adjective must precede the head noun. Now how has this clearly poorly constructed noun phrase qualified to be a book title—
English Plain and Simple?”
Regaining my composure, I wrote this reply to the Tanzania-based medical student who’d often give penetrating feedback regarding my columns:
Knowing you to be a nonnative English speaker who’s admirably knowledgeable about English grammar and usage, your indictment of
English Plain and Simple as a grammatically flawed title is perfectly understandable. After all, the prevailing grammar convention in English is that as a rule, adjectives should be positioned before the noun they modify. This is the so-called
attributive position, as in the noun phrase “major dilemma” where the adjective “major” works as a premodifier. The polar opposite of this is the
predicative position where “major” works as a postmodifier, as in “dilemma major.” To the eyes, ears, and sensibility of many nonnative English speakers, however, this is an awful and patently unacceptable position for that adjective.
Indeed, English adjectives generally don’t work properly in the predicative or postmodifier position. They clearly sound disjointed in
“blunder monumental,” “nonsense absolute,” and
“fool incorrigible.” In contrast, see and feel how prim and proper those noun phrases become when the adjectives are in the normal premodifier position:
“monumental blunder,” “absolute nonsense,” and
“incorrigible fool.” IMAGE CREDIT: SLIDESHARE.COMHowever, due to the influence of French and other Romance languages (most of them position adjectives after the nouns being modified), English has accumulated a sizable number of
postpositive adjectives—adjectives that sound right, look right, and feel right even if positioned after the nouns they modify.
Here are some such noun phrases with postpositive adjectives:
“heir apparent,” “time immemorial,” “body politic,” “devil incarnate,” “accounts payable,” “words unspoken,” “poet laureate,” and
“court martial.” Through repeated usage over the centuries, they have established themselves as perfectly legitimate grammatical constructions in English.
Many native English speakers today thus find it terribly out of line saying these phrases in the normal prepositive but unidiomatic way. However, most nonnative English speakers still insist on still saying them prepositively—
“apparent heir,” “immemorial time,” “incarnate devil,” “laureate poet.” This insistence shows their lack of awareness that some adjectives can, in fact, perfectly work postpositively without a hitch.
Now, discounting the fact that there are indeed a good number of English phrases using postpositive adjectives, is there really any practical use for this breaking of the premodifier norm?
The answer is a definite yes. It’s true that when the information an adjective contains isn’t the main focus of the noun phrase, that adjective should take the attributive or premodifier position, as in
“all bright and beautiful things, all great and small creatures, all wise and wonderful things.” When the objective is to emphasize or dramatize the information supplied by those adjectives, however, it becomes desirable—if the syntax would allow it, of course—to position those adjectives postpositively.
We can clearly see and feel the intended emphasis—in this particular case, the elevation of language and the poetic flourish—that postpositively positioning adjectives imbues these familiar lines from Cecil Frances Alexander’s 1848 inspirational hymn:
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.It was precisely this same mechanism of language that I used to lift the title of my book above the mundane and commonplace. Avoiding the plain-Jane title
Plain and Simple English, I decided to use the much more catchy postpositive
English Plain and Simple instead.
(Next:
When a parenthetical is needed in a sentence) June 13, 2019
This essay, 1,147th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the June 6, 2019 print edition of The Manila Times
, © 2019 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
