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.

Modifiers come in a wide range of semantic types. The prototypical modifiers, property concepts, sort the referents of the noun category into subcategories. Numerals, quantifiers, set-member modifiers (‘next,’ ‘last,’ ordinals), and mensural terms function to select an individual, a set of individuals, or an amount of a nonindividuated object. Nominal modifiers use another referent to situate the head referent, most commonly via relations of possession or location. Modification constructions use a variety of strategies to express the modifier--head referent relation, strategies that are used in many other relations within a construction. Simple strategies do not use any other morphemes to encode the relation, and include juxtaposition and compounding. Relational strategies encode the semantic relation between modifier and referent (more generally, dependent and head), and include adpositions and case affixes. Indexical strategies index a referent, either the head referent or the nominal dependent referent, and include most classifiers. The sources of these strategies are constructions with pronouns, nouns, or verbs; and the strategies may evolve into a linker.

Clause structure may be elaborated by constituents in adjunct function. Adjuncts are of two kinds: modifiers, which are thoroughly integrated into the syntactic structure of clauses, and the more loosely connected supplements. The boundary between adjuncts and complements is not perfectly sharp. Here, we classify adjuncts semantically. Such a grouping is potentially open-ended and leads to overlap between types. The following list of types corresponds roughly to the typical degree of syntactic integration of the adjunct: manner, means, and instrument; act-related; locational (space); temporal (time); degree, intensity, and extent; purpose, reason, and result; concessive; conditional; domain; modal; evaluative; speech act; connective; & supplement.

Supplements are NOT dependents: they are not selected by heads the way complements are. But for every supplement there is some specific constituent that it is (loosely) associated with. We call that its anchor. Supplements can belong to a remarkable range of categories: NPs, clauses of all kinds, AdjPs, AdvPs, PPs, constituents beginning with a coordinator, and even interjections.

Although adjectives typically denote properties, that’s not definitive. The distinctive properties of prototypical adjectives are gradability inflection for comparative and superlative. Adjective phrases (AdjPs) function as predicative complements and modifiers in nominals, though some specialize in one of these. AdjPs take adverbs, notably ‘very’, as modifiers. These properties generally distinguish them from nouns and verbs which can be useful in fused modifier-heads or with overlap, as in ‘it’s flat’ vs ‘I have a flat’. AdjPs differ from DPs in always being omissible from an NP, while a DP in determiner function is often required. Also DPs, but not AdjP can occur in as a fused head in a partitive construction. AdjPs also occur as supplements, here differing from PPs in that AdjPs typically have a predicand that is the subject of the main clause. Like most other phrases, AdjPs allow complements, usually PPs or subordinate clauses.

The adverb category is the most heterogenous in the properties of its members. Many adverbs are formed from adjectives using the ‘⋅ly’ suffix, but AdvPs don’t function as attributive modifiers in nominals and rarely function as or allow complements.

A relative clause is a subordinate clause with an anaphoric relationship to a matrix clause. Often a missing phrase determines the anaphoric relationship. The part of a modifying relative clause that is anaphorically linked to the head noun is called the relativized element. It is overt in ‘wh’ relatives, but in non‘-wh’ relatives it amounts simply to an absence – a location in the clause where there could have been some phrase but it’s missing. In ‘wh’ relatives, the relativized element is the relative phrase or is part of a larger relative phrase. The relative phrase is fronted if it is not the subject. Non-‘wh’ relatives start with subordinator ‘that’ or are bare. In traditional accounts, ‘that’ is wrongly called a relative pronoun.

Most relative clause function as modifiers in a nominal within an NP. We call these integrated. Other relative clauses can function as supplements, which are much more loosely attached.

Some relative constructions are NPs, not clauses. These are the fused relatives, in which the antecedent and the relativized element are fused together instead of being expressed separately. Finally, we mentioned relative clauses in the cleft construction.