More on nesting
Task B - Our answer
Sentences 2 and 3 have nested clauses and they both function as modifiers
inside a noun phrase. That is, they modify the headword of the NP and
they can be substituted for by a simpler, non-clausal modifier without
changing the overall structure of the sentence, or of the phrase they
are nested inside.
Sentence 1 is a simple sentence:
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S
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P
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C
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The little professor with the bow tie
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is |
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a bit silly
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Here the subject NP has professor as its headword, with the determiner
'the' and the adjective 'silly' premodifying it, and the prepositional
phrase 'with the bow tie' postmodifying it.
Sentence 2:
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S
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P
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C
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The little professor (who is wearing
the bow tie) |
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is |
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a bit silly
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Here the subject NP contains a clause ('who is wearing a bow tie', which
has the SPOCA structure SPO) which acts as a postmodifier to the
headword. It substitutes for 'with the bow tie' in sentence 1.
Sentence 3:
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S
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P
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C
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The (bow tie wearing) professor |
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is |
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a bit silly
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Here the subject NP contains a clause ('bow tie wearing', which has the
SPOCA structure OP) which acts as a premodifier to the headword.
It substitutes for 'little' in sentence 1.
In traditional grammars, these sorts of clauses were often called adjectival
clauses, because they were said to act 'like adjectives'. But modern grammarians
usually call them Relative Clauses (RCls) because they can easily
be substituted for by non-adjective modifiers as well as adjectives(compare
1 and 2 above), and they relate to the headword. The most common place
for relative clauses to appear inside noun phrases is after the headword,
where prepositional phrases are much more common than adjectives (see
sentence 1 above).
Postmodifying relative clauses often begin with a relative pronoun ('who',
'which', 'that'), but they can also have no relative pronoun at all (note
that in 2 above you could omit 'who is' and still have a perfectly normal
English sentence in grammatical terms.
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