Adjectives or adjectival nouns occur before the noun they modify, while adjective clauses or reduced form of adjective clauses occur after the nouns they modify.

Recommended books --> adjective

Sport cars --> adjectival nouns

The books which are recommended for this course are on sale now. --> adjective clause.

The books recommended for this course are on sale now. ---> Reduced adjective clause.

Maybe what you mean by the modifiers to occur after the nouns are actually a reduced form of adjective clause.

Marvellous !!! Postnominal modifiers include single-word adjectives, -ed, -en and -ing participles, relative clauses, prepositional phrases, adverbs of place and time and appositives. A reduced relative clause as in (the woman upstairs ) fefers to the woman who happens to be in the upstairs floor. But( the upstairs woman) refers to the woman responsible for running the upstairs floor. However , the usual place for adjectives in English is their occurrence in a prenominal position. Also they occcur after (be) and linking verbs.

Hello Hazim and Faisal,

I really like this discussion. With respect to modifiers that come after the noun, the following examples come to mind:

trail of tears ['of tears' being the prepositional phrase modifying the noun 'trail'.]

ringing of bells ['of bells' being the prepositional phrase modifying the noun 'ringing'.]

The Age of Entanglement [Title of a wonderful book by Louisa Gilder, which I recently finished reading.]

Macs for Dummies [Title of a how-to-do-it book on my bookshelf.]

Handbook of Physics versus Physics Handbook [or should it be Physics' Handbook?]

etc.

One of the things that makes English hard to learn is the fact that words don't commute, i.e., the function of a word is not determined by the word, but rather by its placement:

A 'fire truck', usually written 'firetruck', is not the same thing as a 'truck fire' anymore than a 'show boat", usually written 'showboat', is the same as a 'boat show'. I still remember the confusion in my mind when I was studying the history of computers and I had to differentiate between 'core memory' and a 'memory core'.

I should mention that English is my second language. My first language was, of course, baby talk: goo-goo, gah-gah, dada, etc.

Regards,

Tom Cuff

You have referred to what is termed( of genitive expressions), another types of postnominal modifiers. Thanks a lot for your Marvellous elaboration.

Ringing of bells is further complicated because without the contextual clues that help determine the major phrases we can't even tell if ringing is the sound or the act. At least both are gerunds.

Hello Joseph,

I like your comments on the ambiguity of the phrase 'ringing bells'. I would submit that this phrase is also a good example of non-commuting word pairs as the phrase 'bells ringing' does NOT, in my mind, have the same ambiguity as 'ringing bells', i.e., in the phrase 'bells ringing', the word 'ringing' refers only to the sound of the bells not the act of making them ring.

Regards,

Tom Cuff

It is believed that ALL postnominal modifiers in English are originally reduced relative clauses by which the relative pronoun plus be are deleted without doing much harm to the general meaning of a sentence. Thus the sentence( the bird which is twittering on the tree is a sparrow), will be( the bird twittering on the tree is a sparrow), after the relative clause reduction has been applied.

Hello Hazim,

The example you provided is very interesting. I would like to build on it in the following manner. I would like to commute the reduced phrase as follows: Twittering on the tree, the bird is a sparrow. This sentence can still be parsed, i.e., its meaning is still intact, but it allows the writer to engage the reader by the use of a nonstandard construction. Poets do this all the time, i.e., use nonstandard constructions to entertain, befuddle, and/or educate the reader. Such constructs are why translating poems from or into a different language is so hard both for human and machine translators.

Regards,

Tom Cuff

Hi Tom, I teach a great deal of first year composition and so, returning to the "bells ringing", I still find that ambiguity because I must read my students' work always with the potential error in effect. In this case I suppose a forgotten apostrophe and assume a possessive as a possible intended meaning.

bell's ringing, bells ringing, ringing bells, bell's ringing, ringing Belle's, . . . I imagine all and then parse them all for fit. The singular isn't much better.

Shall we go bell ringing as usual?

Shall we go, bell ringing as usual?

Shall we go Bell, ringing as usual?

now we imagine thes as spoken and not written. . .

Sometimes I wonder, like Consigny or Foucaul, how we communicate successfully at all.

The spoken medium is much more important than the written medium in understanding the message as people find many strategies to rule out ambiguity. Ambiguous structures may occur in writing when the students are unaware of putting the right punctuation marks in their appropriate places and this will definitely results in ambiguity.

Hello Hazim and Joseph,

I suppose the real problem with understanding even a simple phrase like, 'bells ringing', is the problem of intent, i.e., did the writer say what they meant, and mean what they said? Unfortunately, we do not have a meta-language language, i.e., a language about language, and so we must use the English language, for example, to discuss the English language. This, of course, produces a self-referential loop from which one cannot escape.

Regards,

Tom Cuff

I agree with you, Tom Cuff. Best regards.

Interesting question and fabulous answers!

I think that there are two types of modifiers: Pre-modification and Post-modification. They are usually described according to their position before or after the noun. Surely there are some determinations for their use. For examples, adjectives, article, cardinal and ordinal numbers, demonstrative adjectives usually come before head-nouns such as:

a beautiful girl

The first two students.

Those beautiful mountains.

While adjectival clause, noun phrase and prepositional phrases usually come after such as;

The girls whom I met yesterday.

The bridge near our house

Sometimes there are many modification (pre and post) exist. You can imagine a noun with pre-modifications and post-modifications like the noun "students" in this sentences:

The first five intelligent Arab female students in our college, came from Egypt five years ago have graduated yesterday.

Thank you very much, Sabri. Your answer is excellent, too. Best regards. Hazim.

I agree with Mr. Faisal Mustafa