English Grammar Drills

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Post-Noun Modifiers
In this chapter we will examine two of the most important types of noun modifiers that follow
the nouns that they modify: adjectival prepositional phrases and adjective clauses (also known
as relative clauses). Here is an example of each of the types. The noun being modified is underlined,
and the modifier is in italics:
Adjective prepositional phrase:
Adjective clause (relative clause):
The house on the corner belongs to the Smiths.
The house that is on the corner belongs to
the Smiths.
Before we can talk about these modifiers, we need to introduce a new term: noun phrase.
A noun phrase is a noun together with all of its modifiers, both pre-noun and post-noun. For
example, look at the following sentence:
The tall young man in the yellow jacket is my cousin.
The noun man is modified by three pre-noun adjectives, the tall young, and the post-noun adjectival
prepositional phrase in the yellow jacket. Together they all make up the noun phrase the tall
young man in the yellow jacket. We can also represent the noun phrase this way:
pre-noun
modifiers noun post-noun modifiers
The tall young man in the yellow jacket
There is one remarkable fact about noun phrases. They can always be identified by thirdperson
pronoun replacement. In other words, a noun phrase is a group of words that can be
replaced by a third-person pronoun. For example, we can replace our noun phrase with the thirdperson
pronoun he:
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