Pre-Adjectivals in the English Nominal Phrase

Abstract

word in the construction, which is called the 'head.' However, in practice he limits the application 'head' to subordinative (or attributive) constructions, and uses the broader term 'center' to designate a word which belongs to the same form-class as the resultant phrase in any endocentric construction, including coordinative constructions. Thus, in the construction all this fresh bread and sweet butter, the word bread is the head (and the center) of the subordinative construction all this fresh bread, and butter is the head (and center) of the subordinative construction sweet butter. The words bread and butter are the centers (but not the heads, since coordinative constructions do not have heads) of the construction all this fresh bread and sweet, butter. Thus all heads are centers, but not all centers are heads. It is a fundamental ambiguity of English that in coordinative phrases, one cannot tell at what level the conjunction applies, that is, whether modifiers occurring before the first center are understood to modify the second center or not. Do we interpret the example as 'all this fresh bread and all this sweet butter' or 'all this fresh bread, and (some) sweet butter'? The term 'nominal' is used to refer to a word of any sort of morphological composition which functions syntactically in the same way as morphological nouns (i.e., occurs in subject and object positions, participates in nominal transformations, etc.).2 In all English nominal phrases (except appositives3), the center of the phrase is the last nominal in the phrase before prepositional phrase and other postnominal modifiers begin. We shall call it the 'ultimate center.' It is important to distinguish between ultimate centers and centers of subsidiary nominal phrases which are nested within the ultimate phrase. Consider, for example, the phrase the slum area clearance project. Using lines to indicate the magnitude