Friday, June 28, 2019

Well, Whaddaya Know! Why Have I Never Heard of ....


Flowers galore


... postpositive adjectives!  Like "time immemorial" as opposed to prepositive adjectives like "a green tree."  Adjectives that follow a noun or pronoun as opposed to those that precede it.  Now, I paid attention in English class(es) and even enjoyed parsing sentences, but I don't ever remember hearing about these two kinds of adjectives.  Of course, they are very common, but they are so common, I never gave them a thought.  Even Robert Frost's title, A Road Not Taken, has been cited as an example.

So what's the big deal?  Well, there isn't one, actually.  Other than realizing that if I were ever teaching English as a foreign language (which, yes, I have done), that I wouldn't know how to explain when to use post- and when to use pre- ... and so would then have to tell my poor students something like, "You'll just have to memorize them."  A rather hopeless explanation, I admit. And one I always disliked whenever I was studying another language.

And speaking of other languages, yes, postpositive adjectives are common in some of them such as French, Spanish, Italian to name a few.

As for English, here are a few more:

     whiskey sour
     poet laureate
     Chicken Little
     peach Melba
     Brothers Grimm
     words unspoken
     body politic
     forest primeval




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