Noun Modifiers

A noun can modify another noun that follows it. As a modifier, the first noun gives specific
information about the following noun. In nearly all cases, the noun that acts as the modifier is in
singular form.
Eg
Workers couldn’t discuss salary We can use a noun to describe another noun.
information. The first noun acts as an adjective.
art museum
summer vacation
winter coat
How much did she get in each paycheck? Sometimes we write the two nouns as one
daylight word. The noun modifier and the noun
 dishwasher become a compound noun.
drugstore
Anna didn’t have a college education. The first noun makes the second noun more
Some students go to a city college. specific. A college education is a specific
kind of education. A city college is a specific
kind of college.
Ellen just got her driver’s license. Sometimes the first noun ends in ’s (using
master’s degree possessive adjective)
bachelor’s degree

https://prezi.com/zyqaev_7rkgd/modification-of-nouns/?
frame=0774a3edac11e4c20b6047e3fca2cada92c52dcd
Look quickly at the text and find the answers to these questions. 1 Which of the following
reasons are given in the text to explain the British banks' profitability?
b) reduction in the number of branches
d) reduction in the level of bad debts
f) large-scale processing of transactions
h) British customers preferring to stay with the same bank
i) the strength of the economy
Easy money

Britain’s high street banks are extremely profitable – and widely criticised for their poor
performance. What’s going on?

Andrew Buxton, chairman of Barclays, ought to have looked a troubled man as he presented his
bank’s annual results last week. In the last year, Barclays had lost a chief executive, dropped
£205m on rash trading in the bond markets, another £153m on bad loans to Russian customers,
and had let its operating costs run out of control.

Yet Barclays somehow managed to make profits of £1.9bn.

In the same year, Lloyds TSB reported a 14 per cent increase in its pre-tax profits to £3.29bn,
equivalent to an after-tax return on shareholders’ equity of 33 per cent. And other British banks
made similar profits.

So where do these profits come from? And why have they not been lost to the competition from
other institutions?
The first part of the answer lies in the condition of the UK economy at large. In principle, bank
profits are built for the most part on the volumes of loans they make and the deposits they
collect; the margins between the interest rates for these two sides of their balance sheet gives
them their profits (or losses). But in a mature market such as the UK, it is hard for a very large
bank to expand loan and deposit volumes much beyond the level of the economy as a whole, and
even harder to widen net interest margins.

The biggest factor in bank profits has therefore been bad debts. In 1992, when banks’ accounts
showed the worst of the effects of the last UK recession, the seven principal banks set aside
£6.45bn of bad debt provisions between them. Last year, the total for the same group is estimated
to have been around £2.6bn.

The other side of British banks’ profitability reflects an interplay between technology-based
efficiency gains and customer inertia.

Banks have become more efficient over the past decade, stripping out costs as new computer
systems and telecommunications networks have enabled them to set up industrial-scale
processing plants for tasks that used to be handled by clerks in the back of each branch.

Branches are expensive to run, and the network has been whittled down from a peak of 21,800
branches in 1985 to around 15,000 today. Each branch, too, has fewer staff.

One of the most frequent complaints is the disappearance of the human touch in the bank branch.
Yet customers have reaped most of the benefits of the banks’ efficiency gains – cash dispensed at
the touch of a button by machines, instant account balances, transfers and even loans available
over the telephone.

However, British banks remain years behind their French rivals in electronic banking. Nor is the
UK’s money transmission system the most consumer-friendly in the world. Customers in New
Zealand and Canada get deposits credited instantaneously, while in the UK they must wait days.

Competition in financial services has been steadily increasing since the 1980s. Yet the British
consumer is more likely to swap a wife (or husband) than a bank. With such undemanding
customers, leading banks could have years of fat profits ahead of them.
What is a Modification of Nouns
Modification of nouns is when a noun can be modified by adjectives and other nouns.

1.
Nouns can be modified both by adjectives and by Kobe Bryant is a famous basketball
other nouns. Adjective and noun modifiers usually player.
come before the noun they modify. The noun that is adjective modifier
modified is called the head noun. noun modifier
When there are both adjective and noun modifiers, head noun
the noun modifier comes closer to the head noun.
2.
Noun modifiers usually come directly before the Milk chocolate is chocolate made with
nouns they modify. milk.
A noun can modify another noun that follows it. Chocolate milk is milk that has
As a modifier, the first noun gives specific chocolate in it
information about the following noun. In nearly
all cases, the noun that acts as the modifier is in
singular form.

How much did she get in each

Sometimes we write the two nouns as one word.
paycheck?
The noun modifier and the noun become a
daylight
compound noun.
dishwasher
drugstore

Sometimes the first noun ends in ’s (using Ellen just got her driver’s license.
possessive adjective) master’s degree
bachelor’s degree
3.
Two common types of adjective modifiers are • It was a boring movie.
present participles and past participles (also called • The bored viewers left.
participial adjectives).

Remember that participial adjectives that end in -

ing describe someone or something that causes a • The result of the game was shocking.
feeling. • The news is exciting.
Participial adjectives that end in -ed describe • We were shocked by the result.
someone who experiences a feeling • Everyone is excited by the news.
4.
When there is more than one modifier of a noun, the modifiers generally occur in a fixed
order. The following list shows the usual order of common adjective and noun modifiers. The
order can be changed by the emphasis a speaker wants to give to a particular adjective.

though grammatical, would not normally occur in everyday speech or writing.

Descriptive adjectives used in this way belong to seven main types.

For example, if you wanted to use an adjective referring to size and an adjective
referring to shape, you would put the size adjective first,
e.g
a large round table
Similarly, an age adjective would normally be placed before an origin adjective, e.g.

a young Italian woman

POSITIO CATEGORY OF
N MODIFIER
1 Opinions • ugly, beautiful. dull, interesting
2 Size • big, tall, long, short
3 Age or temperature • old, young, hot, cold
4 Shapes • square, round, oval, diamond
5 Colors • red, blue, pink, purple
6 Origins, nationalities, or • computer-generated, Brazilian, Chinese, middle-
social classes class
7 Materials • wood, cotton, denim, silk, glass
5.
When a noun has two or more modifiers in the • He is a serious, hardworking student.
same category, we separate the adjectives with a • I bought a beautiful denim shirt.
comma. If the modifiers are in different categories,
do not separate the adjectives with a comma.

The order of adjectives in the same category can • He is a serious, hardworking student.
• He is a hardworking, serious
 vary. student.

Ex 1: Complete the following review of a fashion show by filling the blanks with the modifiers
placed in their correct order. Place commas where necessary.
Last week at __________________ 1. (fashion/ the/ annual) show in Paris, 2. (young/some/
bright)_______________ designers displayed their latest creations. Everybody had
expected____________ 3. (these/ spring/ new) fashions to be similar to last year’s rather
ordinary and boring clothes; instead, the designers delighted the audience with a brilliant
presentation. Drawing on 4. (different/ many/ international) inspirations, they
showed________5. (first/ exciting/ the/new) collection in a decade.
Ans
1. The annual fashion
2. Some bright young
3. These new spring
4. Many different international
5. The first exciting new
6.
A compound modifier consists of two words
connected by a hyphen, which act together like one
adjective. Usually, compound modifier words could
be understood as individual modifiers or nouns, so
the hyphen is required to clarify the function of the
words.
 Four common kinds:
 I work in a 10-story building.
A. number + noun  It's a prize-winning film.
B. noun + present participle  it's a crime-related problem.
C. noun + past participle  The actor plays a long-haired,
D. adjective + past participle one-armed pirate in the movie.

• Her daughter is 10 years old.

Plural nouns used as modifiers become singular • She has a 10-year-old daughter.
when they come before the noun. NOT
She has a 10 year old daughter
 BE CAREFUL!
In written English, avoid having more than two • Jerry Gonzales won the student
noun modifiers together. Using too many noun portrait painter award.
modifiers in sequence can be confusing.

Look at the example: Is Jerry a student who won an

award for painting portraits? Is Jerry a painter who
won an award for painting students? Is the award
given by the students?
To avoid confusing sentences like this, break up the
string of noun modifiers with prepositional phrases
or rearrange the modifiers in some other way.
• Jerry Gonzales won the award for
painting portraits of students.
OR
• Student Jerry Gonzales won the award
for painting portraits.

• The clever little brown-and-white fox

There is no similar problem with adjective terrier impressed us all. (All the
modifiers. adjectives clearly modify fox terrier.)

Ex 2: Rewrite each item as a noun with modifiers including a compound modifier.

Example: 2 silver candlesticks ninety-five years old
-> two ninety-five-year-old silver candlesticks
1. 1 dinning room table                     200 years old
2 8 dinning room chairs                    covered in velvet
3. 2 Tiffany lamps                              century old
4. 1 samovar                                     plated in silver
5. 1 chandelier                                  leader with crystal
Ans.
1. one two-hundred-year-old dining room table
2. eight velvet-covered dining room chairs
3. two century-old Tiffany lamps
4. one silver-plated samovar
5. one leaded crystal chandelier
 
FROM GRAMMAR TO WRITING
AGREEMENT: Subject-verb agreement and Pronoun-antecedent agreement
1. Subject-verb agreement
Every sentence can be divided into 2 parts: the subject and the predicate.
+ The subject - a person, place or thing about which something is said
+ The predicate- said about the subject, always contains the principal verb.
Example:
*Complete subject and the complete predicate
Koalas live in Australia.
The danger of credit cards is that they encourage us to live beyond our means.
===> To determine the complete subject of a sentence, ask a who or what question.
* One word in the complete subject —-> controls the verb in the sentence
—-> Find the word that the other words modify —--> determine the main subject.
Ex: 
My blue silk necktie is gorgeous.
Our first three attempts were unsuccessful. 
*Note:
1. The main subject of a sentence- never located in a prepositional phrase (a phrase beginning
with a preposition and ending with a noun or pronoun, for example, on the table).
Ex:
One of my best friends has nine credit cards.
Both of my brothers are behind on their car payments.
 
2. There - often the grammatical subject of a sentence, and linked to a word later in the
sentence that controls the verb. (There and the noun it is linked to)
Ex:
There are numerous animals on the Endangered Species List.
There have been many environmental disasters in the last 20 years.
There is a large, fierce dog guarding the house. 
 
*Compound subjects- the subject is composed of more than one item. The items are often
connected by “and”.
Ex: Ron and Laurie are going to join a health club
The blue whale, the timber wolf, and the whooping crane need our protection
Note: Compound subjects- constitute a single phrase made up of two or more items acting as a
unit. —--> take a singular verb
Ex: Bacon and eggs is a high-cholesterol but nourishing meal. (Bacon and eggs is a single dish.)
The owner and manager of the bank is Mr. Andy. (Mr.Andy is one person who has two roles.)
 
* Subjects connected by either/ or and neither/ nor - different from compound subjects. - The
subject closer to the verb —-> determine the agreement.
 
Ex: Either the president or his cabinet members are responsible for this environmental policy
(two subjects: president, members; members is closer to the verb and requires the plural verb
“are”)
 
2. Pronoun-antecedent agreement
Pronouns agree in person, number and gender with their antecedents (words to which they refer).
Ex:
All the students brought their books to class on the first day. (Their agrees with students)
Jack ate his lunch quickly. (His agree with Jack)
* The pronouns everyone/everybody, anyone/ anybody, someone/somebody, and no one/
nobody - treated differently in conversational and standard formal English
 
Formal Informal

1. Everyone drove his or her own car to the 1. Everyone drove their own car to the
picnic picnic
2. If you see anyone from our office, tell him or 2. If you see anyone from our office, tell
her to see me. them to see me.
 
*Be careful!
- Use the forms on the right above only in informal (conversational) English. Use the correct
singular forms in writing and formal speech
-  Change the subject to a plural —> make a sentence correct for formal English
Informal: Everyone brought their own lunch
Formal: All the employees brought their own lunch.