More about modifiers

Below are my comments (on an article of a newspaper) published by the newspaper together with the answers from the writer.


I REFER to the article Modifiers awry (MOE, Dec 18) and, in particular, to the statement that she found a seashell beautiful would be unacceptable. This was accompanied by an illustration with the caption: When ten years old, her mother had her ears pierced.

I would like to bring MOE readers’ attention to an extract from The Internet Grammar of English.

(http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/index/index.htm):-

Inherent and Non-inherent Adjectives

Most attributive adjectives denote some attribute of the noun which they modify.

For instance, the phrase a red car may be said to denote a car which is red.

In fact most adjective-noun sequences such as this can be loosely reformulated in a similar way:

an old man ~ a man who is old

difficult questions ~ questions which are difficult

round glasses ~ glasses which are round

This applies equally to postpositive adjectives:

something understood ~ something which is understood

the people responsible ~ the people who are responsible

Now my question is ­– Why can’t beautiful in the sentence she found a seashell beautiful (especially if the noun is preceded by the definite article) be treated as being used postpositively to mean she found a seashell which was beautiful?

As for the picture (which could have been produced 30 or 40 years ago), why can’t the girl be some girl’s mother and consequently, can there be anything wrong with the sentence, “When ten years old, her mother had her ears pierced?” – Kengt, Penang

Kengt is quite right in his comments on my article. I have been rather careless in my example, viz. “She found a seashell beautiful”, which could mean “She found a seashell which was beautiful” but which, however, is a long-winded way to say “She found a beautiful seashell (with the usual adjective-noun order). Alternatively, the given example could mean “She found a seashell to be beautiful”, implying that she was seeing a seashell for the first time and that she found it to be a beautiful object – in which case the sentence would have been better constructed as in the alternative version. Perhaps I should have given a better example to illustrate my point, thus: “A seashell beautiful was found in her room”, with the adjective and the noun in reverse order – which is not generally acceptable except in poetry and in certain idiomatic expressions (which I indicated in my article).

Now to the topic of postpositive adjectives raised by Kengt. Yes, an old man = a man who is old, difficult questions = questions which are difficult, and round glasses = glasses which are round – but convert them into phrases with postpositive adjectives, rather than the equivalent adjective clause, and try fitting any of such phrases into an acceptable sentence. Convert, for example, difficult questions into questions difficult; and then consider whether the following sentences are equivalent or acceptable: Mutu attempted the difficult questions first = Mutu attempted first the questions which were difficult = Mutu attempted the questions difficult first.

As to the illustration, yes, there is nothing grammatically wrong with the caption which reads: “When ten years old, her mother had her ears pierced”, but the caption may be interpreted as either the mother or the daughter having had her ears pierced. There would, however, be no ambiguity if the sentence was read in context. Taken out of context (as in the illustration), the sentence was ambiguous, so that an “error alert” (or correction) was inserted in order to avoid any ambiguity. – Dr Lim Chin Lam, Penang