Postpositive adjective


A postpositive adjective or postnominal adjective is an adjective that is placed after the noun or pronoun that it modifies, as in noun phrases such as attorney general, queen regnant, or all matters financial. This contrasts with prepositive adjectives, which come before the noun or pronoun, as in noun phrases such as red rose, lucky contestant, and busy bees.
In some languages the postpositive placement of adjectives is the normal syntax, but in English it is less usual, largely confined to archaic and poetic uses, phrases borrowed from Romance languages or Latin and certain fixed grammatical constructions.
In syntax, postpositive position is independent of predicative position; a postpositive adjective can occur in either the subject or the predicate of a clause, and any adjective may be a predicate adjective if it follows a linking verb. For example, monsters unseen were said to lurk beyond the moor, but the children trembled in fear of monsters unseen and the monsters, if they existed, remained unseen.
Recognizing postpositive adjectives in English is important for determining the correct plural for a compound expression. For example, because martial is a postpositive adjective in the phrase court-martial, the plural is courts-martial, the suffix being attached to the noun rather than the adjective. This pattern holds for most postpositive adjectives, with the few exceptions reflecting overriding linguistic processes such as rebracketing.

Occurrence in languages

In certain languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Romanian, Arabic, Persian, Vietnamese and Khmer, postpositive adjectives are the norm: it is normal for an attributive adjective to follow, rather than precede, the noun it modifies. The following example is from French and Spanish:
In particular instances, however, such languages may also feature prepositive adjectives. In French, certain common adjectives, including grand, usually precede the noun, while in Spanish they can be prepositive or postpositve adjectives, in Vietnamese, most adjectives derived from Chinese precede the nouns:
When an adjective can appear in both positions, the precise meaning may depend on the position. E.g. in French:
Prepositive and postpositive adjectives may occur in the same phrase:
In many other languages, including English, German, Russian and Chinese, prepositive adjectives are the norm, and adjectives appear postpositively only in special situations, if at all.

In modern English

General uses

;Compulsory
Adjectives must appear postpositively in English when they qualify almost all compound and some simple indefinite pronouns: some/any/no/every...thing/one/body/where, those Examples: We need someone strong; those well baked; Going anywhere nice?; Nothing important happened; Everyone new did not know.
All adjectives are used postpositively for qualifying them precisely. The user follows the set formula:
This can be replaced by that or so, or, archaically and in some dialects, yea. Without the preposition the formula is even more intuitive in replies. Examples pointing: "Which of the greyhounds do you like?" "Dogs this big." "A dog that weighty would definitely fit the bill." "A dog that tall to match my friend's." Examples figuratively: "A dog so fast it could win at the track".
;Optional
Generally to these scenarios:
  1. When it is wished to modify adjectives using an adjective phrase in which the head adjective is not final. Such phrases are common in speaking and in writing save for the reflexive which is a bit stark but common in fiction. Examples: ...anxious to leave, proud/full of themselves. Comparative forms are positioned before/after the noun, as in we need a box bigger than......a bigger box than.... Set compounds and near variations. technology easy-to-use; easy-to-use technology; fruit ripe for picking; ripe-for-picking fruit. The postpositive holds more sway for many of the briefest and simplest of such phrases. Examples: job in hand; task underway; a case in point
  2. Followed by verbs in the infinitive form for some adjectives, mainly as to size, speed, emotions and probability. Examples: Officers ready to be deployed...Passengers happy to leave...Tourists sad to leave...Team ecstatic with their performance...Solutions likely to work...City large enough...Rocket fast enough; can precede equally if compounded with hyphens. Example: We need numbers of ready-to-deploy officers.
The optional positions apply to the debatable pronoun and near synonym pairs any way/anyhow, some way/somehow, as well as to no way, in every way. Examples: It was in some way good; it was good in some ways; it was good somehow; it was somehow good.
Certain adjectives are used fairly commonly in postpositive position. Present and past participles exhibit this behavior, as in all those entering should..., one of the men executed was..., but at will this can be considered to be a verbal rather than adjectival use. Similar behavior is displayed by many adjectives with the suffix -able or -ible. Certain other adjectives with a sense similar to those in the foregoing categories are customarily found postpositively. Their antonyms and variations of due can be placed in either position. These two words are among the least varied from the original Anglo-Norman and Old French terms, reflected in modern French, themselves all close to common Latin original forms. A third is used in locating places and in mainly dated use for complex objects: Sweden/the village/town/city proper...operating on the heart proper, it means "more narrowly defined", or "as more closely matches its character".
Adjectives may undergo a change of meaning when used postpositively. Consider the following examples:
  1. Every visible star is named after a famous astronomer.
  2. Every star visible is named after a famous astronomer.
The postpositive in the second sentence is expected to refer to the stars that are visible here and now; that is, it expresses a stage-level predicate. The prepositive in the first sentence may also have that sense, but it may also have an individual-level meaning, referring to an inherent property of the object. Quite a significant difference in meaning is found with the adjective responsible:
  1. Who should be the responsible people?
  2. Can you direct me to people responsible?
Used prepositively, can you direct me to the responsible people?, it strongly connotes "dedicated" or "reliable", and by use of the heavily conditional "should be" it denotes that, otherwise, as in the second sentence, it denotes the far more commonly used meaning in the 21st century of "at fault" or "guilty" unless the qualifying word for is added.

Set phrases

There are many set phrases in English which feature postpositive adjectives. They are often loans or loan translations from foreign languages that commonly use postpositives, especially French. Some examples appear below:
Certain individual adjectives, or words of adjectival type, are typically placed after the noun. Their use is not limited to particular noun. Those beginning a before an old substantive word can be equally seen as adverbial modifiers, intuitively expected to be later.
Phrases with postpositive adjectives are sometimes used with archaic effect, as in things forgotten, words unspoken, dreams believed. Phrases which reverse the normal word order are quite common in poetry, usually to fit the meter or rhyme, as with "fiddlers three" or "forest primeval", though word order was less important in Early Modern English and earlier forms of English. Similar examples exist for possessive adjectives, as in "O Mistress Mine".

Titles of works

Titles of books, films, poems, songs, etc. commonly feature nouns followed by postpositive adjectives. These are often present or past participles, but other types of adjectives sometimes occur. Examples: Apocalypse Now Redux, "Bad Moon Rising", Body Electric, Brideshead Revisited, Chicken Little, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, A Dream Deferred, Hannibal Rising, Hercules Unchained, House Beautiful, Jupiter Ascending, The Life Aquatic, A Love Supreme, The Matrix Reloaded, Monsters Unleashed, Orpheus Descending, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Prometheus Unbound, "The Road Not Taken", Sonic Unleashed, To a God Unknown, Tarzan Triumphant, Time Remembered, The World Unseen, Enemy Mine.

Other postpositive noun modifiers

Nouns may have other modifiers besides adjectives. Some kinds of modifiers tend to precede the noun, while others tend to come after. Determiners come before the noun. Noun adjuncts also generally come before the nouns they modify: in a phrase like book club, the adjunct book comes before the head club. By contrast, prepositional phrases, adverbs of location, etc., as well as relative clauses, come after the nouns they modify: the elephant in the room; all the people here; the woman to whom you spoke.
Sometimes a noun with a postpositive modifier comes to form a set phrase, similar in some ways to the set phrases with postpositive adjectives referred to [|above]. Some such phrases include:
In some phrases, a noun adjunct appears postpositively. Examples include Knights Hospitaller, Knights Templar, , airman first class, as well as many names of foods and dishes, such as Bananas Foster, beef Wellington, broccoli raab, Cherries Jubilee, Chicken Tetrazzini, Crêpe Suzette, Eggs Benedict, Oysters Rockefeller, peach Melba, steak tartare, and duck a l'orange.
Identifying numbers, and sometimes letters, appear after the noun in many contexts. Examples are Catch-22; warrant officer one, chief warrant officer two, etc.; Beethoven's Symphony No. 9; Call of Duty Three, Rocky Four, Shrek the Third, Generation Y.
Other common cases where modifiers follow a head noun include:
In the plural forms of expressions with postpositive adjectives or other postpositive modifiers, the pluralizing morpheme is added after the noun, rather than after the entire phrase. For instance, the plural form of town proper is towns proper, that of battle royal is battles royal, that of attorney general is attorneys general, that of bride-to-be is brides-to-be, and that of passer-by is passers-by. See also Plurals of French compounds.
With some such expressions, there is a tendency to add the plural suffix to the end of the whole expression. This is usually regarded by prescriptive grammarians as an error. Examples are *queen consorts and *court-martials.
This rule does not necessarily apply to phrases with postpositives that have been rigidly fixed into names and titles. For example, an English speaker might say "Were there two separate Weather Undergrounds by the 1970s, or just one single organization?". Other phrases remain as they are because they intrinsically use a plural construction, such as eggs Benedict, nachos supreme, Brothers Grimm, Workers United.