DESCRIBING AND CLASSIFYING THE REFERENT
THE PRE-MODIFIER FUNCTIONS: DESCRIPTOR AND CLASSIFIER
The pre-modifier describes or classifies the referent by means of open-class items, mainly adjectives and nouns. Unlike the determiner, these are optional. Furthermore, and again unlike determinatives, there is no grammatical constraint on the number of modifiers placed before a noun. The main types of structural element that either describe or classify will now be illustrated.
The true -en participial derived from a verb, such as broken in a broken cup, is distinguished from ‘pseudo-participials’, which are derived from nouns, as in:
A dark-green, big-leaved, long-stemmed plant with orange flowers
A dark-haired girl
a baseball--capped teenager
Pseudo-participials are often modified, as the modification represents some non- essential feature. We don’t say *a leaved plant, *a haired girl, because plants normally have leaves and girls have hair. Not all leaves are big and not all girls’ hair is dark, however, allowing the formation of big-leaved and dark-haired. In a baseball-capped teenager, by contrast, no modifier is needed because wearing a baseball-cap is not an essential feature of a teenager.
