Complete Reference: The Noun Phrase
Full References
The discussion of the choice of language noted that a single concept is often signaled by a variety of words, each word possessing slightly different connotations. We can indicate that people are less than content by saying they are angry , irate , incensed , perturbed , upset , furious , or mad. The broader our vocabulary, the greater our options and the more precisely we can convey our meaning. And yet no matter how wide our vocabulary may be, a single word is often insufficient. A single word, by itself, can appear somewhat vague, no matter how specific that word might seem. The term “dog” may be specific compared to “mammal,” but it is general compared to “collie.” And “collie” is general compared to “Lassie.” Then again, many different dogs played Lassie!
Suppose
you want to indicate a female person across the room. If you don’t know her
name, what do you say?
That
girl.
If
there were more than one, this alone would be too general. It lacks
specificity.
The girl in the blue Hawaiian shirt…
The taller of the two cheerleaders by the
water cooler…
When
a single term will not supply the reference we need, we add terms to focus or
limit a more general term. Instead of referring to
drugs
in a discussion, we might refer to
hallucinogenic drugs.
We might distinguish between
hard
drugs
and
prescription drugs
.
In so doing we modify the notion of a drug to describe the specific one, or
ones, we have in mind. (Then again, at times we are forced to use many words
when we cannot recall the one that will really do, as when we refer to
that funny
device doctors pump up on your arm to measure blood pressure
instead of a
sphygmomanometer
).
This section examines how we construct full and specific references using noun
phrases. An ability to recognize complete noun phrases is essential to
reading ideas rather than words. A knowledge of the various possibilities for
constructing extended noun phrases is essential for crafting precise and
specific references.
Nouns
To
begin our discussion, we must first establish the notion of a noun.
English
teachers commonly identify nouns by their content.
They describe nouns as words that "identify people,
places, or things," as well as feelings or ideas—words like
salesman
,
farm
,
balcony
,
bicycle
, and
trust.
If you can
usually put the word
a
or
the
before a word, it’s a noun. If you can make the word plural or
singular, it's a noun. But don't
worry...all that is needed at the moment is a sense of what a noun might be.
Noun Pre-Modifiers
What
if a single noun isn't specific enough for our purposes?
How then do we modify a noun to
construct a more specific reference?
English
places modifiers before a noun.
Here
we indicate the noun that is at the center of a noun phrase by an asterisk
(*) and modifiers by arrows pointed toward the noun they modify.
white
house
*
large
man
*
Modification
is a somewhat technical term in linguistics. It does not mean to change
something, as when we "modify" a car or dress. To modify means to limit,
restrict, characterize, or otherwise focus meaning. We use this meaning
throughout the discussion here.
Modifiers
before
the noun are called pre-modifiers.
All of the pre-modifiers that are present and the noun together
form a
noun phrase
.
NOUN
PHRASE
pre-modifiers
noun
*
By
contrast, languages such as Spanish and French place modifiers after the noun
casa
blanca white house
* 
homme
grand big man
*
The
most common pre-modifiers are adjectives, such as
red
,
long
,
hot
. Other types of words often play
this same role.
Not only articles
the
water
*
but also verbs
running
water
*
and
possessive pronouns
her
thoughts
*
pre-modifiers
limit the reference in a wide variety of ways.
Order:
second,
last
Location:
kitchen,
westerly
Source or Origin:
Canadian
Color:
red,
dark
Smell:
acrid,
scented
Material:
metal,
oak
Size:
large,
5-inch
Weight:
heavy
Luster:
shiny,
dull
A number of pre-modifiers must appear first if they appear at all.
Specification:
a, the, every
Designation:
this, that, those, these
Ownership/Possessive:
my, your, its, their, Mary’s
Number:
one,
many
These
words typically signal the beginning of a noun phrase.
Some
noun phrases are short:
the
table
®
*
Some
are long:
the second shiny red Swedish touring
sedan
*
a large smelly red Irish
setter
*
my carved green Venetian glass salad
bowl
*
the three old Democratic
legislators
*
Notice that each construction would function as a single unit within a
sentence.
(We offer a test for this
below,)
The
noun phrase is the most common unit in English sentences.
That prevalence can be seen in the
following excerpt from an example from the section on the choice of language:
The stock market’s summer swoon turned into a dramatic routTo appreciate the rich possibilities of pre-modifiers, you have only to see how much you can expand a premodifier in a noun phrase:
Monday as the Dow Jones industrial average plunged. The stock market’s summer swoon turned into a dramatic rout
Monday as the Dow Jones industrial average plunged.
*
the book
the history book
the American history book
the illustrated American history book
the recent illustrated American history book
the recent controversial illustrated American history book
the recent controversial illustrated leather bound American history book
Noun Post-Modifiers
We
were all taught about
pre
-modifiers: adjectives appearing
before
a
noun in school.
Teachers rarely speak
as much about adding words
after
the
initial reference.
Just as we find
pre
-modifiers, we also find
post
-modifiers—modifiers coming
after a noun.
The
most common post-modifiers are prepositional phrases:
the book
on the table
*
civil conflict
in Africa
*
the Senate
of the United States
*
Post-modifiers
can be short
a dream deferred
*
or long, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s reference to
a
dream
that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves
*
and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together
at a table of brotherhood.
What
does King have?
A dream?
No. He has a specific dream. Once we are
sensitive to the existence of noun phrases, we recognize a relatively simple
structure to the sentence.
Here we
recognize a noun phrase with a very long post-modifier—thirty-two words to be
exact.
We do not get lost in the
flow of words, but recognize structure. At the point that we recognize
structure within the sentence, we recognize meaning. (Notice also that
post-modifiers often
include clauses which themselves include complete sentences, as in the last
example above.)
Post-modifiers
commonly answer the traditional news reporting questions of
who
,
what
,
where
,
when
,
how
, or
why
.
Noun post-modifiers commonly take the following
forms:
prepositional
phrase
the dog
in the store
*
_ing
phrase
the girl running to the store
*
_ed
past tense
the man
wanted by the police
*
wh
- clauses
the house
where I was born
*
that/which
clauses
the thought
that I had yesterday
*
The noun together with all
pre- and post-modifiers constitutes a single unit, a noun phrase that
indicates the complete reference. Any agreement in terms of singular/plural
is with the noun at the center.
The
boys
on top of the house
are .............
*
Here the noun at the
center of the noun phrase is plural, so a plural form of the verb is called
for (not a singular form to agree with the singular
house)
.
The Pronoun Test
In
school, we were taught that pronouns replaced
nouns
.
Not so.
Pronouns replace
complete noun phrases
.
Pronoun replacement thus offers a test of
a complete noun phrase. Consider:
The
boy ate the apple in the pie.
What
did he eat?
The boy ate
the
apple
in the pie.
*
Want
proof? Introduce the pronoun “it” into the sentence.
If a pronoun truly replaces a noun, we’d
get
*The boy ate
the
it
in
the pie.
No
native speaker would say that!
They’d say
The boy ate
it.
The
pronoun replaces the complete noun phrase,
the apple in the pie
.
This pronoun substitution test can be particualrly useful. Not all
prepositional phrases after a noun are necessarily part of the noun
phrase – they could be later predicate or sentence modifiers. In other
words, we must not only identify noun phrases, we must parse out other
material, and in that act recognize broader aspects of sentence
structure.
The web page on distinguishing sentence and predicate modifiers
(www.criticalreading.com/sentence_predicate_modifiers.htm) discusses the
three sentences:
- 1. The boy ate the apple in the pie.
- 2. The boy ate the apple in the summer.
- 3. The boy ate the apple in a hurry.
Boxes Within Boxes: Testing for a Complete Noun Phrase
The
goal of reading, we noted above, is not to recognize grammatical features,
but to find meaning.
The goal is not
to break a sentence or part of a sentence into as small pieces as possible,
but to break it into chunks in such a way that fosters the discovery of
meaning.
Consider one of the examples above of a
prepositional phrase as a post-modifier:
the
book
on the table
Book
is a noun at the center of the noun phrase.
But
table
is also a noun.
If we analyze the noun phrase completely, on all levels, we
find:
the
book
on the table
*
on the
table
®
*
We can have prepositional phrase within
prepositional phrase within prepositional phrases:
…the
book
on the table in the
kitchen…
*
on the
table
in the kitchen…
*
in the
kitchen
…
*
We
don't want to recognize every little noun phrase. We want to recognize the
larger ones that shape the
meaning.
The book is not "on
the table."
The book is
"on the table in the kitchen."
The Senate of the United States is
composed of two legislators from each State.
Question: Who is in the Senate?
a) two legislators
b) two legislators from each State?
The
answer is b). The full Senate consists
of two from each state (100 people), not simply two! We read the sentence as
The
Senate of the United States
is
composed of
two
legislators
from each State.
*
If
we read the sentence as
The Senate of the
United States
is
composed of two legislators
from
each State.
we
miss the meaning.
Earlier
we noted that
pre
-modifiers in noun phrase can be expanded to
significant length. For the most part, we increased the length of the
pre-modifier by adding additional adjectives, a word or two at a time.
Noun phrase
post
-modifiers can be
expanded to much greater lengths.
We
can add long phrases which themselves contain complete sentences.
the park where
I hit a home run when I
was in the ninth grade
.
*
The sentence within the post-modifier is printed in
boldface.
The
following sentence indicates something was lost.
What was lost?
He lost the book by Mark
Twain about the Mississippi that he took out of the library on Sunday before
the game so that he could study during half time when his brother was getting
popcorn.
The
answer is the complete phrase
……… the book by Mark
Twain about the Mississippi that he took out of the library on Sunday before
the game so that he could study during half time when his brother was getting
popcorn.
The
base term
book
is modified as to author (Mark Twain), topic (about the
Mississippi), as well as intent or purpose (that he took out of the library on
Sunday before the game so that he could study during half time when his brother
was getting popcorn.)
We assume that he has another book by
Twain about the Mississippi that he did not lose.
Want proof?
What
would be replaced by “it”?
The full reference of a noun
phrase is often “conveniently” ignored in movie advertisements. Janet Maslin,
movie critic for
The New York Times
, complained when an advertisement for the
video tape of John Grisham’s "The Rainmaker" quoted her as describing the movie
as director Francis Ford Coppola’s “best and sharpest film,” when, in fact,
her review stated:
John Grisham’s "The Rainmaker" is Mr. Coppola’s best and
sharpest film in years.
(1)
The original quotation does not refer to
the “best and sharpest film” of Coppola’s career, but to his “best and
sharpest film in years.”
Implications For Reading and Writing
The
above discussion introduces a number of concepts crucial to effective reading
and writing.
- We do not read texts word by word, but chunk by chunk. We must read each grammatical construction as a single unit. Deciphering sentences involves isolating phrases within a sentence and recognizing where long phrases begin and end.
- To write well is not to string words together, but to string together larger phrases, to create full references that carefully distinguish one idea from another, going beyond talking in vague generalities. We can increase the clarity and sophistication of our thought by using extended phrases instead of single words.
Sophisticated
thought is qualified thought. Intelligent discussion goes beyond
either/or or black-or-white views of the world to recognize nuances and
distinctions.
Remarks can be
- extended (made broader or more general) ,
- qualified (restricted in some way), or
- limited (made more specific or less encompassing).
Good writers carefully distinguish between all, most, many, some, few, and one. They specify the specific time, condition, or circumstances an assertion is true. Some claims are made for certain, some "in all probability" or "within a specific margin of error," some for given conditions.
When drawing careful distinctions, authors are not being wishy-washy or nit picking. They are simply being precise. They are saying exactly what they want to say or feel secure in saying based on the available evidence. Weak writers can achieve an immediate gain in the level of thought of their writing by taking advantages of the opportunities for adding pre- and post-modifiers.
For writers, this model is a reminder of the opportunity to extend, limit, or otherwise shape a specific idea. You can greatly increase the sophistication and depth of thought of your work by taking advantage of these pre- and post-modifier "slots". Having written a statement, you might go back in editing to see how you can further shape your thoughts by making use of these slots.
The Constitution is the nation’s charter, and lawmakers
should resist the temptation to push for amendments every time an election
year rolls around.
Notice how much richer the next sentence
is (additional modifiers in bold face) .
The Constitution
of the United States
is the
nation’s
bedrock
charter, and
devoted
lawmakers
sworn to uphold it
should
resist the
dangerous
temptation to push for
pandering
amendments every time an election year rolls around.
