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10 - Verb Phrases as Attributive Nominal Modifiers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2024

By
Bas Aarts
Edited by
Eva Duran Eppler ,
Nikolas Gisborne  and
Andrew Rosta
Eva Duran Eppler
Affiliation:
Roehampton University, London
Nikolas Gisborne
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Andrew Rosta
Affiliation:
University of Central Lancashire, Preston
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Summary

English allows participial forms of verbs to modify nouns, as in the following example: The Rapids in 1834 was a straggling village whose 44 residents clustered mainly along the river on the east side of a single dirt path – the future Front Street. (iWeb Corpus) In this paper, I will address the question of whether attributive V-ing premodifiers in noun phrases are adjectives or verbs. I discuss the evidence for treating (some of) these formatives as adjectives, e.g. deverbal adjectives such as interesting, satisfying, etc., and I will look at the evidence for regarding others, such as straggling in the example above as verbs. I will then discuss so-called ‘synthetic compounds’, such as cake-eating (bear), beer-swilling (neighbour) and wall-straggling (flower). These will be analysed as verbal constructions rather than as adjectives. The evidence will involve the semantics and combinatory properties of V-ing premodifiers in English noun phrases. I will show that V-ing premodifiers can take a full range of dependents and that, with some restrictions, combinations of dependents, e.g. a complement and an adjunct, are also possible.

Keywords

compoundargumental compoundsynthetic compoundverbal compoundpresent participlemodifierV-ing modifierExperiencer ConstraintFirst Sister Principleparticipial modifier
Type
Chapter
Information
Word Grammar, Cognition and Dependency , pp. 231 - 251
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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