Adjectives and Adjective Phrases (AP)
In many languages there is one lexical category whose primary function is to modify nouns. This category is generally labeled ADJECTIVE. Adjective modifiers in English normally occur before the head noun. Thus the basic order of constituents in the English NP (ignoring modifying and complement clauses for now) is: Det-A-N-PP, as seen in the examples in (10).
(10) a that little dog under the table
b a secret admirer in the Ministry of Education
But it is not unusual for more than one word to occur between the determiner and head noun. For example, sentences like those in (11) show that adjective modifiers can themselves be modified by adverbs of degree (sometimes called INTENSIFIERS).
(11) a You have [a very beautiful daughter].
b [A surprisingly large majority] voted in favor of the amendment.
c Mary coaxed her son to swallow [the extremely bitter medicine].
d John has just discovered [a rather interesting species of flatworm].
What is the internal structure of these NPs? Does the combination of intensifier plus adjective form a constituent (an AP), as indicated in (12b), or are both of these elements individually daughters of the NP, as in (12a)?1
(12) a NP→ Det (Adv) (A) N (PP)
b NP→ Det (AP) N (PP)
AP → (Adv) A
The examples in (13) show that both the intensifier and the adjective are optional within the NP. This is, of course, what we would expect since neither of them is the head of the NP. But these examples also show that, while the adjective can occur without the intensifier, the intensifier cannot occur without the adjective.
(13) a You have [a very beautiful daughter].
b You have [a beautiful daughter].
c ∗You have [ a very daughter].
d You have [a daughter].
This fact could not be explained using the PS rule in (12a). However, the rule in (12b) offers an immediate explanation: the Ap as a whole is optional, so we can get an NP with neither adjective nor intensifier as in (13d). But if there is an AP, it must include an adjective, since that is the head.
Another piece of evidence supporting the analysis in (12b) is the fact that there may be several adjectives modifying the head N of the same NP, as in (14a); and each of these adjectives can be modified by an intensifier, as in (14b).
(14) a You have a [beautiful, intelligent, considerate] daughter.
b You have a [very beautiful, extremely intelligent, unusually considerate] daughter.
There is no fixed limit on how many modifiers can appear in such a sequence. But in order to represent an arbitrarily long string of alternating adjectives and intensifiers, it is necessary to treat each such pair as a single unit.
The “star” notation used in (15) is one way of representing arbitrarily long sequences of the same category. For any category X, the symbol “X∗” stands for “a sequence of any number (zero or more) of Xs.” So, the symbol “AP∗” stands for “a sequence of zero or more APs.” It is easy to modify the rule in (12b) to account for examples like (14b); this analysis is shown in (15b). Under the analysis in (12a), we would need to write a more complex rule something like (15a).2 Because simplicity tends to be favored in grammatical systems, (12b) and (15b) provide a better analysis for this construction.
(15) a NP→ Det ((Adv)A) ∗ N (PP)
b NP→ Det AP∗N (PP)
Further evidence for the existence of the AP constituent is seen in the fact that the combination of intensifier plus adjective can be conjoined in coordinate structures like (16). This is significant because only constituents can normally be conjoined in this way.
(16) You have a [[very beautiful]AP but [slightly crazy] AP]AP daughter.
Finally, the combination of intensifier plus adjective appears in other contexts as well, and not just as a modifier inside NP. The sentence in (17) contains an AP functioning as a “predicate complement.”3 If we did not recognize the AP as being a constituent, we would be forced to repeat the same sequence found in (12a) in the PS rules for these other constructions as well, leading to a highly redundant description of the facts.
(17) Your daughter is [very beautiful].
For all of these reasons, we will adopt the analysis in (12b). Of course, an AP in English may be more complicated than those we have been considering. Some examples are shown in (18), but we will not try to develop a rule to account for all of these possibilities here. Our purpose is not to present a detailed analysis of English, but to give an example of the kinds of evidence that can be used to identify sub-constituents, i.e. phrases embedded within other phrases.
(18) a The [smaller than normal] crowd disappointed the organizers.
b The minister’s [too numerous to mention] mistakes have seriously embarrassed the government.
1. This discussion is patterned after Bickford (1998, Case and agreement).
2. Note that even in (15a) the outer parentheses mark the intensifier plus adjective as forming a single unit.
3. See Non-verbal predicates for a discussion of this construction.
