Level: Intermediate-Advanced
PREMODIFIERS
Typically, a noun phrase consists of a noun or a pronoun while noun phrases also include:
Determiners These shoes are very colorful.
Quantifiers She’s worked in many companies.
Numbers The company has about a hundred subsidiaries across the world.
Adjectives She is one of my oldest friends.
These parts are called premodifiers as they are placed before the noun.
Premodifiers are used in this order:
determiners and quantifiers > numbers > adjectives + NOUNS
Examples:
The three ideas > The three ideas
Our brilliant ideas > Our brilliant ideas
Three brilliant ideas > Three brilliant ideas
These three brilliant ideas > These three brilliant ideas
Some brilliant ideas > Some brilliant ideas
All those three brilliant ideas > All those three brilliant ideas
Their many brilliant ideas > Their many brilliant ideas
Postmodifiers
Postmodifiers are the parts found after the noun.
Postmodifiers can be prepositional and -ing phrases, relative and that clauses, or to infinitives.
- prepositional phrases:
a company with a social corporate responsibility programs
that girl in that pink floral dress
the building at the end of the block
- –ing phrases :
the clothes hanging over there
the employee having a meeting with the client
- relative clauses :
the project she worked on for a year
the closet that my father assembled
the manager who proposed this initiative
an twenty-year-old lad who came by this morning
- that clauses. This is commonly placed after nouns such as idea, fact, belief, suggestion:
They’re still not satisfied with their record, in spite of the fact that they won the competition.
Carla got the impression that her new team didn’t support her.
There was a suggestion that the public library should be renovated.
- to infinitives :
She’s got no conferences to attend.
These infinitive postmodifiers are common after indefinite pronouns and adverbs:
We should think of something to do.
They have nowhere to go.
It is also possible to have more than one postmodifier:
a fifty-year old CEO with a degree which he received from Harvard
those students on the field playing football