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NOUN COMPOUNDS Nouns (Finn. substantiivit) are the "building blocks" used to form sentences. However, they do not act alone. Let’s take the word "device". What type of device are we talking about? What is its function? How does it differ from other devices? We seek to answer such questions when we place modifiers either before or after nouns. Nouns combine with their modifiers to form noun phrases. Table 1 illustrates a number of noun phrases. Examples would include "portable devices", "devices that detect bombs", or a combination of both "portable devices that detect bombs". In each of the above examples, the modifiers occur either before or after the main noun (underlined). We shall refer to this main noun as the "head" noun.
Table 1. Different options for modifying a noun to form complex noun phrases In spoken English, the most common modifiers of nouns are adjectives (Finn. adjektiivit). Adjectives are a class of words that describe, define, or quantify nouns and are typically placed before, pre-modify, the noun:
As shown in Table 1, in addition to adjectives, formal academic writing commonly exploits four other grammatical structures to modify nouns. These structures differ in their grammatical form and placement, either before (i.e., pre-modification) or after (i.e., post-modification) the main noun. In this unit, we shall only deal with the first of these four structures: the noun compound. |
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