Delahunty and Garvey
postmodifier position of noun phrases. Postmodifying APs also tend to allow
the Whiz-test: Anyone who is fond of kumquats.
If the head of the NP is an indefinite pronoun such as someone, some-
thing, anything, nothing, then any attributive AP will occur after it:
(40) a. I heard something strange.
b. I haven’t heard anything new.
c. I see nothing unusual.
Appositive noun phrases (AppNPs) and Appositive Relative Clauses
(AppRCs) occur as “parenthetical asides” after their head noun. They are
usually blocked off in writing by surrounding commas (dashes are also pos-
sible). In speech, they are surrounded by perceptible pause and often a fall
in voice pitch, akin to the aside spoken by a stage actor. The appositive NP
has the same referent as the rest of the NP. Thus in Table 6 his nominee and
an infamous scoundrel designate the same individual. Since appositives can
be expanded just like any other NP, they allow for infinite embedding. Sen-
tence (41) suggests the possibilities.
(41) His nominee, an infamous scoundrel with principles learned from
years of service in one of the most corrupt political machines ever de-
vised by the devious minds that have blemished history, is unlikely
to be elected.Appositives provide extra information that is generally viewed as not be-
ing required for the identification of the referent of the NP. Some handbooks
say that they can be omitted without changing the meaning of the sentence
they occur in. This is quite misleading. The meaning of the sentence certainly
changes, though what the affected NP refers to may not.
Verbal phrases (VblPs), which will be dealt with further in our chapter on
Multi-clause Sentences, are like adjective phrases: short VblPs precede noun
heads; longer VblPs, which may possess their own range of objects, comple-
ments, and modifiers, follow the head noun within a noun phrase. In general,
short modifiers tend to precede head nouns and longer ones tend to follow
them.
Relative clauses were introduced in our chapter on Minor Parts of Speech
and will be more fully discussed in our chapter on Modifications of Basic
Clause Patterns. These clauses usually begin with a wh-word, that, or no intro-
ducer at all: The soldier who died... , The thing that gets me... , The book
[ ] you wrote...