Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
This paper will discuss some ramifications of the rules for producing noun modifiers in English. Most noun modifiers can be accounted for in a generative grammar by three transformational rules. The first of these adjoins a sentence to a noun as a relative clause, and the other two form post-nominal and prenominal modifiers by the operations of deletion and order change respectively. These three transformations will be referred to as embedding rules. They are applied once, in order, to a given sentence, and adjoin that sentence to a noun phrase as modifier. Not every noun phrase can accept a relative clause, however; for the embedding rules to work properly the grammar must include certain constraints on their application. The determiner of the noun phrase is the decisive element in the acceptance of relative clauses.
1 This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.
2 The generative grammar that is the frame of reference for this paper is that developed primarily by Noam Chomsky; see his Syntactic structures ('s-Gravenhage, 1957) and later papers. I would like to thank Chomsky, Lila Gleitman, and Hugh Matthews for helpful discussions of this paper.
3 For a detailed discussion of the embedding rules see C. Smith, ‘A class of complex modifiers in English’, Lg. 37.342–65 (1961).
4 ‘Containing’ sentences dominate ‘contained’ sentences: in The ball that he bought is blue, the containing sentence is The ball is blue, the contained is He bought the ball.
5 An exception must be made for intensifies occurring with nouns like fact, theory, idea. Intensifies usually occurring only with a may occur with the before such nouns. These nouns are exceptional on other grounds also: the transformation adjoining a sentence to a noun with that applies only to them. Note that this transformation does not apply when the noun has an R relative clause, nor when its article is indefinite.
The mere fact that he went surprised me. (Intensifier, that + S)
* A mere fact that he went surprised me. (same)
* The mere fact that he unearthed surprised him. (Intensifier, R relative)
6 The transformation must be stated in greater detail, according to the structure of the contained sentence and the role played in it by the shared nounphrase (cf. an unpublished paper by E. S. Klima). For simplicity, since these points are not relevant here, I assume that the shared nounphrase is the subject of the contained sentence.
7 This sentence has more than one reading; see §5.
8 Adjectival complements are phrases or clauses dependent on a preceding adjective (blue in the face, taller than George, etc.). For a detailed discussion see the paper mentioned in fn. 3.
9 Some speakers find this construction unacceptable. For them the rule that produces 37 from 36 is obligatory (see below).
10 Some rules that differentiate between is and common verbs are given in Syntactic structures and by R. B. Lees, The grammar of English nominalizations (Bloomington, 1960).
11 Klima's paper is published in Fodor and Katz, Readings in the philosophy of language (New York, 1963).
12 A generic noun is usually taken to be a noun that is grammatically a count noun but semantically a mass noun. Thus in the first example the cat refers to a class of cats rather than a particular cat.
12a See R. B. Lees, ‘On the constituent-structure of English noun-phrases’, IBM research 1961; H. G. Sørensen, Word classes in modern English (Copenhagen, 1958).
13 The possibilities of this example seem to depend on extralinguistic knowledge; if bird were changed to dinosaur, for instance—The dinosaur caught the worm—the sentence might be acceptable as generic in a book about the habits of dinosaurs.
14 ‘The transformational status of the definite article in English’, Transformation and discourse analysis projects, No. 38 (University of Pennsylvania, 1961). Mrs. Robbins discusses the definite article in great detail, giving many examples of both anaphoric and generic the.
15 A careful study would add to such an interpretive rule as this. For instance, the in object position is not taken as generic if the subject nounphrase is a proper name.
