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A genitive construction involves two nouns, the head (or modified noun) and the dependent (or modifier noun). In dependent-marking languages, a dependent genitive noun modifies the head by expressing some property of it. For example, in the construction "John's jacket", "jacket" is the head and "John's" is the modifier, expressing a property of ...
Most English compound nouns are noun phrases (i.e. nominal phrases) that include a noun modified by adjectives or noun adjuncts. Due to the English tendency toward conversion, the two classes are not always easily distinguished. Most English compound nouns that consist of more than two words can be constructed recursively by combining two words ...
Some nouns also indicate the specific use for the object in question, including the nature of how it is to be used by the subject in a sentence. Nouns can be modified by adjectives, demonstratives, and numeral classifiers and modified nouns will usually undergo vowel lengthening from (C)(V)(C) to (C)(V)(V)(C). Types of nouns in Mortlockese ...
Adjectives may be used as in English, to modify a noun (e.g., gótt vatn, good water), or may stand alone as a de facto pronoun (e.g., gótt, a good thing). The only difference in their declensions is the masculine accusative singular ending, which is -n in pronouns and -an in adjectives. Genitive and dative plurals are indistinct in gender for ...
In the older Semitic languages, the use of the construct state is the standard (often only) way to form a genitive construction with a semantically definite modified noun. The modified noun is placed in the construct state, which lacks any definite article (despite being semantically definite), and is often phonetically shortened (as in ...
Examples of the above types of modifiers, in English, are given below. It was [a nice house]. (adjective modifying a noun, in a noun phrase) [The swiftly flowing waters] carried it away. (adjectival phrase, in this case a participial phrase, modifying a noun in a noun phrase) She's [the woman with the hat].
Words that function as compound adjectives may modify a noun or a noun phrase.Take the English examples heavy metal detector and heavy-metal detector.The former example contains only the bare adjective heavy to describe a device that is properly written as metal detector; the latter example contains the phrase heavy-metal, which is a compound noun that is ordinarily rendered as heavy metal ...
However, other nouns that may be possessed do not undergo any sound changes, and instead the possession is indicated either by the separate possessive word sich'i, or by the prefix si-. For example, k'esh becomes sich'i k'esh (my birch tree) and tin (trail) becomes sitin (' my trail '). [6] Verbs can be changed into nouns with the suffix -e ...