LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 16:4 April 2016
ISSN 1930-2940

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Noun Modifying Expressions in Tamil

S. Rajendran, Ph.D.

Abstract

Nouns are modified by noun modifiers. English makes use of pre and post modifiers. Tamil makes use of pre modifiers only. The pre modifiers in Tamil could be phrasal or clausal in nature. The phrasal modifiers include determiners, possessive nouns, possessive pronouns, attributive adjectives, participial adjectives, nouns and appositive noun phrases. Postpositional noun modifiers are absent in Tamil. The clausal modifiers are adjectival participle or relative participle clauses. The clausal modifiers are referred here as noun modifying expressions and they are the target of this paper. There are two kinds of noun modifying expressions. They are correlative relative clause and relative participle clause. The correlative relative clause has two parts: the first part containing a finite verb suffixed by the interrogative suffix -oo is called modifying part and the second part containing the modified noun or noun phrase is called head. The relative participle clause contains a verb in relative participle or adjectival participle form. The relative participle clause can modify a noun which belongs to the verb in relative participle form or it can modify a noun which does not belong to the verb in the relative participle form. The fist types of nouns are called argument nouns and the second type of nouns are called non-argument nouns. Not all the non-argument nouns can occupy the head position. There are constrains on the heads of the noun modifying expressions. Only a set of nouns which is capable of expressing or abstracting or objectivizing the information contained in the relative participle clause can occupy the head position. There are noun modifying expressions with finite clauses and they are linked to the head noun by en-complementizers.

Keywords: adjective participle , adjective participle clause, argument nouns, clausal modifiers, compressed noun modifying expression, correlative relative clause, non-argument noun, NME, noun modifying expression, phrasal modifiers, post modifiers, pre modifiers, relative clause proper, relative participle, relative participle clause

1. Introduction

Based on the positions of their occurrence, noun modifiers can be classified into two types: pre modifiers and post modifiers. Pre modifiers are those which come before nouns and post modifiers are those which come after nouns. Based on the constitution, noun modifiers can be further classified into two types: phrasal modifiers and clausal modifiers. Phrasal modifiers are phrasal in nature whereas clausal modifiers are clausal in nature (i.e. with a verb inside). All the above mentioned types of modifiers are found in English. English makes use of attributive adjectives (e.g. a clean vessel), participial adjectives (a broken vessel, a washing power) and nouns (e.g. office work) as phrasal pre modifiers. Determiners including articles (e.g. this boy, a boy, and the girl), possessive nouns (e.g. Kannan’s book) and possessive pronouns (e.g. our car, his child) are also pre noun modifiers. Prepositional phrases (e.g. the door of the car, the money inside the box) and appositive noun phrases (e.g. the chairperson, Mr. Kannan) function as phrasal post modifiers in English. English makes use of relative clause (e.g. the deer that has spots, the person who drew the picture), ing-clause (e.g. the crow sitting on the tree, the woman preparing the food) ed-clause (e.g. the plate paced on the table, the thief chased by the police) and to-clause (e.g. the person to see) as clausal post modifiers (Biber et al 2009).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

S. Rajendran, Ph.D.
Centre of Excellence in Computational Engineering and Networking (CEN)
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
Coimbatore 641 112
Tamilnadu
India
rajushush@gmail.com
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