A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§ 7.1 Three kinds of fused head 97

There are preferences as to relative order, especially among pre-head modifiers. A
big black dog, for example, will be strongly preferred over a black big dog. Numeral
modifiers usually precede adjectives, as in the three young nurses, but under
restricted conditions the reverse order is found, as in an enjoyable three hours.

6 External modifiers

External modifiers in an NP are located within the NP but outside the
head nominal. There are various subtypes, all highly restricted with respect to the
range of expressions admitted. Here we illustrate just three of these subtypes:

[40] i all the children, both her sons, half a day, twice the amount we'd askedfor

ii such a disaster, too risky a venture, so difficult an assignment

iii even the children, only a politician, the prime minister alone, the boss herself

Those in [i] are quantificational expressions that occur before various determiners.

Those in [ii] are adjectives or AdjPs which occur as external modifier only before

the indefinite article a(n).

Those in [iii] do not require the presence of a determiner: they occur, for exam­

ple, with proper nouns, as in even Kim, Julia herself, etc.

7 The fused-head construction

In all the NP examples so far the head element has been distinct from the
dependents and filled by a noun. We turn now to a construction where the head is
combined, or fused, with a dependent element, usually the determiner or an internal
modifier. That is, a single word is at the same time a determiner or modifier and also
the head. We call this the fused-head construction.

7.1 Three kinds of fused head

We distinguish three subtypes of the fused-head construction, illustrated

in [41], where square brackets enclose the NP and underlining marks the fused head:

[4 1] SIMPLE

11 PARTITIVE

iii SPECIAL

Kim has lots of friends, but Pa t doesn 'f seem to have [illl,Y ].

[Some of his remarks] were quite flattering.

I have two photos of her, but [both] are out offocus.

[Manyl would disagree with you on that point.

[explicit]

[implicit]

In all these examples the underlined word is a determinative combining the func­
tions of determiner and head.

The simple subtype

Here it is possible to expand the fused-head NP into an ordinary NP with a separate
head - one retrieved from the context. Thus in [41 i] we could replace any by any friends.