Noun groups / phrases

Nouns with pre-modifiers and post-modifiers make a noun chunk or phrase. When you have a few of these in one sentence, things get complicated to read.

Noun phrases

Be aware of how pre and post words (modifiers) build up noun groups / phrases. Sometimes the build up of modifiers makes the sentence harder to read. You can chop out words you don't need to simplify your sentences.

Often a noun phrase is just a noun or a pronoun:

People like to have money. I am tired.

Premodifiers

But noun phrases can also include:

• determiners: Those houses are very expensive.

• quantifiers: I've lived in a lot of houses.

• numbers: My brother owns two houses.

• adjectives: I love old houses.

These parts of the noun phrase are called premodifiers because they go before the noun.

We use premodifiers in this order:

For example:

Determiners and quantifiers	Numbers	Adjectives	NOUNS
The	six		children
Our		young	children
	Six	young	children
These	six	young	children
Some		young	children
All those	six	young	children
Their many		young	children

Post-modifiers

Other parts of a noun phrase go after the noun. These are called post-modifiers.

Post-modifiers can be:

• prepositional phrases:

a man with a gun the boy in the blue shirt the house on the corner

• –ing phrases :

the man standing over there the boy talking to Angela

• relative clauses :

the man we met yesterday the house that Jack built the woman who discovered radium an eight-year-old boy who attempted to rob a sweet shop

• that clauses. These are very common after nouns like idea, fact, belief, suggestion:

He's still very fit, in spite of the fact that he's over eighty. She got the idea that people didn't like her. There was a suggestion that the children should be sent home.

• to infinitives :

I've got no decent shoes to wear.

These are very common after indefinite pronouns and adverbs:

You should take something to read. I need somewhere to sleep.

There may be more than one post-modifier:

an eight-year old boy with a gun who tried to rob a sweet shop that girl over there in a green dress drinking a Coke

What to do

Readability suffers when three words that are ordinarily separate nouns follow in succession. Once you get past three, the string becomes unbearable.

Technically, clustering nouns turns all but the last noun into adjectives. However, many users will think they’ve found the noun when they’re still reading adjectives, and will become confused.

Bring these constructions under control by eliminating descriptive words that aren’t essential. If you can’t do that, open up the construction by using more prepositions and articles to clarify the relationships among the words.