Friday December 18, 2009

Modifiers awry

Ramblings:By DR LIM CHIN LAM

The generic term modifier and how adverbs, adjectives, and participles – as well as their phrases – can go awry or ‘dangle’.

IN AN earlier article, “Why we don’t say beautiful contest” (MOE, June 27, 2008), I dealt with the word modifier in the restricted sense – a noun, verb, name, or phrase that functions as an attributive adjective.

In the broadest sense, a modifier is any adjective or adverb – the former modifying a noun or substantive, and the latter modifying “the meaning of an adjective, verb, or other adverb, or of a sentence” (Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 2004).

Necessarily, present and past participles functioning as adjectives also fall into the category of modifiers, as do adjective phrases, adverb phrases, and participial phrases. [Clauses with similar function are also included in the generic term modifier.]

Adverbs and adverb phrases

The placement of adverbs can convey different meanings. Consider the following:

(1) Only he came yesterday – only one person, he, came;

(2) He only came yesterday – he merely came, he did nothing else;

(3) He came only yesterday – he came only once, viz. yesterday;

(4) He was here only yesterday – he was here as recently as yesterday.

Similarly, certain other adverbs (even, just, and merely) may also cause ambiguity when carelessly positioned in a sentence. It is, therefore, advisable to place the adverb immediately before the word it modifies.

As with one-word modifiers, care need be exercised in the placement of adverb phrases and adverb clauses in order to avoid unintended meanings.

I remember coming across, many years ago, a newspaper report of a schoolgirl just about to enter her school compound when she was waylaid by a would-be rapist but was saved by the ringing of the school bell. The headline, however, read (with my underlining): Schoolgirl saved from rape by bell – as if a bell is capable of rape!

Consider a recent example (AFP report carried in Sunday Star, Dec 6, 2009, page WB34): Thailand’s revered king has called on the politically divided nation to unite during a brief public excursion from hospital to mark his 82nd birthday. Does it mean that the king asked his people to unite only for the short duration of time when he was away from the hospital on the occasion of his 82nd birthday?

Ambiguity may be avoided by rearranging the words of the sentence and/or adding some other words so that the adverb phrase appears next to the verb it modifies and not to some other verb.

Besides having the unnecessary present perfect tense has called amended to the simple past tense called, the said report could be revised thus: During a brief public excursion from hospital to mark his 82nd birthday, Thailand’s revered king called on the politically divided nation to unite.

Adverbs usually modify an adjective, a verb, or another adverb. Then there are certain adverbs, including adverb phrases, which modify a sentence. Note the following examples:

(1) Hopefully, it will not rain tomorrow.

(2) Mercifully, he died peacefully.

(3) However, the examination was much easier than he had anticipated.

(4) In fact, the problem was due to a misunderstanding.

In the above cases, the sentence-modifying adverb or adverb phrase is placed at the beginning of the sentence and is usually separated from the rest of the sentence by a comma. If placed later in the sentence, the adverb or adverb phrase would, advisedly, be included within commas, thus:

(1) The examination was, however, much easier than he had anticipated.

(2) The problem was, in fact, due to a misunderstanding.

Adjectives and adjective phrases

In common use, adjectives are placed before nouns (she found a beautiful seashell). A reversed word-order (she found a seashell beautiful), would be unacceptable. However, an inverted (i.e. reversed) construction is acceptable in poetry (“and with thee fade away into the forest dim” – Keats, Ode to a Nightingale) or in certain expressions (battle royal, heir apparent, president elect, professor emeritus, time immemorial).

There are certain constructions where an adjective may be mistaken for an adverb. Consider the following example: She looked sad, NOT she looked sadly. Here the word sad is correct, being an adjective used in the predicative; on the other hand, the word sadly is wrong, not being an adverb modifying the verb looked.

There are many other examples of such usage of the adjective instead of the adverb – and they are usually associated with verbs of perception:

(1) The food smells bad, NOT The food smells badly;

(2) The music sounded awful, NOT The music sounded awfully;

(3) The table surface feels rough.

One must, however, note that the “ungrammatical” sit tight (instead of sit tightly) may be deemed idiomatic (note that, in English, any expression which cannot be explained rationally is deemed idiomatic), or, according to Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 2004, is informal, meaning “(1) remain firmly in one’s place. (2) refrain from taking action or changing one’s mind”.

Similarly, note another “ungrammatical” construction, sit pretty (instead of sit prettily), which is informal and means “to be in a comfortable situation” (The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 1973).

When several adjectives are used in a sequence, there is an unwritten rule for ordering the adjectives in the sequence. For word-order of adjectives, I use the mnemonic OpSiShACOM to categorise adjectives according to types, viz. Opinion, Size, Shape, Age, Colour, Origin, Material. Thus we say clear blue sky (Opinion clear, Colour blue), NOT blue clear sky.

Similarly, it is big round wooden table (Size big, Shape round, Material wooden), NOT wooden big round table. [Readers will have great fun constructing phrases with more than two consecutive adjectives and arranging them in a conventional order.]

There are three aspects of the subject of word-order of adjectives.

Firstly, adjectives of the same type are separated by and (lean and hungry look); and more than two adjectives of the same type are separated by commas, with and for the last (cold, dark and dingy cell).

Secondly, the placement of determiners (such as a, the, every, many, three, and fifth) in a sequence of adjectives must be noted. Determiners are words which, in the old grammar books, were classified as adjectives but are now classified as a sub-class of adjectives. A determiner is “a modifying word that determines the kind of reference a noun or noun group has” – Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 2004. In arranging adjectives in a sequence, a determiner precedes the other adjectives (the descriptive adjectives). Thus it is three blind mice, NOT blind three mice.

Thirdly, consideration must be given to the actual entity modified by the descriptive adjectives. It could be fish market or health food or white wine or red wine, which each are entities unto themselves – the two words are inseparable so that they could be imagined as two words conflated into one, or as a single hyphenated word. Thus it is Japanese fish market, NOT fish Japanese market; reliable health food, NOT health reliable food; and French red wine, NOT red French wine.

Then there are the phrasal adjectives like a few, a great many, many a, and a couple of. The strange thing about them is that each of them is made up of a singular and a plural word. When in use, do they take a singular or a plural noun, and is the following verb in the singular or the plural? Here one may apply the rule of proximity attraction. The following are examples of the phrasal adjective in the plural:

(1) A few prowlers were seen in the neighbourhood, and

(2) A great many mistakes were made in the past; and in the singular:

(1) More than one mistake is one mistake too many, and

(2) There is many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.

And now to adjective phrases. What has been said above about adverb phrases applies to adjective phrases too – that the placement of the phrase can affect the meaning (gardens with fruit trees surround the village, NOT gardens surround the village with fruit trees).

Parting note

The concluding Part 2 will deal with the quirks of participles and participial phrases.