Adjective that occurs immediately after the noun or pronoun that it complements
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, or busy bees.
In some languages (Spanish, Welsh, Indonesian, etc.), the postpositive placement of adjectives is the normal syntax, but in English it is largely confined to archaic and poetic uses (e.g. "Once upon a midnight dreary", as opposed to "Once upon a dreary midnight") as well as phrases borrowed from Romance languages or Latin (e.g. heir apparent, aqua regia) and certain fixed grammatical constructions (e.g. "Those anxious to leave soon exited").[1]
In syntax, postpositive position is independent of predicative position; a postpositive adjective may occur either in the subject or the predicate of a clause, and any adjective may be a predicate adjective if it follows a copular verb. For example: monsters unseen were said to lurk beyond the moor (postpositive attribute in subject of clause), but the children trembled in fear of monsters unseen (postpositive attribute in predicate of clause) and the monsters, if they existed, remained unseen (predicate adjective in postpositive position).
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.
^Rodney Huddleston, English Grammar: An Outline, CUP 1988, p. 109.
and 26 Related for: Postpositive adjective information
A postpositiveadjective or postnominal adjective is an adjective that is placed after the noun or pronoun that it modifies, as in noun phrases such as...
(predicative) Tell me something funny. (postpositive) The good, the bad, and the funny. (substantive) Adjective comes from Latin nōmen adjectīvum, a calque...
grammar, following a related word or phrase, as with a postpositiveadjective Look up postpositive in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Postpositivism (international...
restrictive in its use of postpositive position for adjectival units (words or phrases), making English use of postpositiveadjectives—although not rare—much...
The phrase attorney general is composed of a noun followed by the postpositiveadjective general and as other French compounds its plural form also appears...
modify; for exceptions see postpositiveadjective), as in the big house, or predicatively, as in the house is big. Certain adjectives are restricted to one...
Sandefur have disagreed with this usage, saying that "general" is a postpositiveadjective (which modifies the noun "solicitor"), and is not a title itself...
that express an adjectivally attributive meaning can be affixed to form adverbs, such as interestingly and excitedly. 2. In postpositive phrases. These...
serpent". However Danish only uses the postpositive article when the noun does not carry an attributive adjective or a genitive, while otherwise a prepositive...
nominalized adjective is an adjective that has undergone nominalization, and is thus used as a noun. In the rich and the poor, the adjectives rich and poor...
modifies (expresses an attribute of) a noun in the manner of an attributive adjective, rather than express an independent idea as a predicate. In English (and...
"attorney general" is an example of a noun (attorney) followed by a postpositiveadjective (general). "General" is a description of the type of attorney, not...
Spanish adjectives are similar to those in most other Indo-European languages. They are generally postpositive, and they agree in both gender and number...
orthography sometimes uses the term proper adjective to mean adjectives that take initial capital letters, and common adjective to mean those that do not. For example...
or was said earlier. Demonstrative constructions include demonstrative adjectives or demonstrative determiners, which qualify nouns (as in Put that coat...
In linguistics, a privative adjective is an adjective which seems to exclude members of the extension of the noun which it modifies. For instance, "fake"...
refer to them as possessive adjectives, though they do not have the same syntactic distribution as bona fide adjectives. Examples in English include...
intensive adverb in Great Britain. Intensives also can function as postpositiveadjectives. An example in American English today is "the heck", e.g. "What...
cases. The original locative case had been replaced by four so-called postpositive cases, the inessive case, illative case, adessive case and allative case...
whereas postpositiveadjectives in names and titles are not (cf. the cultural organisation Matica srpska, with a small s in the adjective srpska ‘Serbian’)...
the Administration of Justice (Language) Act (Ireland) 1737. The postpositiveadjectives in many legal noun phrases in English—attorney general, fee simple—are...
pronouns, there are also distributive determiners (also called distributive adjectives). The pronouns and determiners often have the same form: Each went his...
nice folks). In some cases they are post-head (or postpositive) modifiers, with particular adjectives like galore (e.g., stories galore) or with certain...
a postpositive adverb that modifies the clause, "There is ..." By contrast, the third sentence contains "international" as a prepositive adjective that...
nouns or adjectives in a sentence, which become predicate nouns and predicate adjectives. Copulae are thought to 'link' the predicate adjective or noun...
been called possessive adjectives. However, modern linguists note that they behave more like determiners rather than true adjectives (see examples in the...
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