A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

100 Chapter 5 Nouns and noun phrases

Instead of the fused-head construction in cases like these we use an NP with one as
head: a critical one, a hard one, some small ones.
The modifiers which most readily fuse with the head include these:

• detenninatives used in modifier function following a determiner (e.g. these two)


• superlatives and comparatives (the best, the most important of them, the taller
  of them)


• ordinal numeral words (the second, the eighth)
  o certain semantic categories of adjective, e.g. colour adjectives as in the blue and
  nationality adjectives that aren't also count nouns, as in the French, the English,
  the Dutch (we don't get *The Belgian are very courteous because we use the
  count noun instead: The Belgians are very courteous).

7.4 Compound fonns

There are a number of forms where the fusion of determiner and head has
become a morphological fact: every, some, any, no have formed compound words with
nouns like body, one, and thing, making words like everybody, someone, and nothing.
(Body and one have the special meaning "person" in these compounds.) There is a sim­
ple way to tell that the determiner is fused with the head: it is not possible to insert a
modifier between them. Adjectival modifiers follow the head instead of appearing in the
usual pre-head position. The contrasts between the [a] and [b] cases in [48] show this:

[48] FUSED HEAD

i a. somebodvfamous

ii a. nothing harmful

SEPARATE HEAD

b. �famous person

b. no harmful thing

Notice that no one is a compound although it is usually written with a space as if it
were two words (it is sometimes written as no-one, but not as noone). The test just
mentioned shows that it is a compound: No one fa mous showed up at the premiere
cannot be expressed in the form No fa mous one showed up at the premiere.

8 Pronouns

Pronouns form a subclass of nouns distinguished syntactically from
common nouns and proper nouns by their inability to take determiners as depend­
ent. We say 1 am ill, not This I am ill; we say She likes him, not The she likes the
him. They nevertheless occur as head of NPs functioning in the main NP positions
of subject, object, predicative complement, complement of a preposition. They form
a subclass of nouns rather than being a separate category.
There are several different kinds of pronoun, illustrated in [49]:

[49] PERSONAL
ii RECIPROCAL
iii INTERROGATIVE
iv RELATIVE

Llike them

They dislike each other

Who saw them leave?

the guy who helped us

Yo ur sister underestimates herself.

We were helping one another.

What do you want?

the book which you recommended