Spiral Galaxy

This is why foreigners find English so hard to learn properly.

Adjectives postpositive

If you heard your friend say, “Last night I ate a dinner delicious,” you would probably find that sentence a little odd. That’s because the adjective delicious is placed postpositively, meaning after the noun that it modifies. In English, the general rule is for adjectives to be prepositive, or placed before the nouns they modify. We say, “I had a good time,” and not “I had a time good.” But as is often the case in English grammar, there are plenty of exceptions to the rule.

One notable area of exception is in terms borrowed from Romance languages, where postpositive adjectives are common. We say professor emeritus, musician extraordinaire, steak flambé, chicken cacciatore, and pasta puttanesca.

Certain phrases in English that have become accepted as a unit feature postpositive adjectives, such as solicitor general and notary public. Compound nouns such as these typically pluralize by adding the plural ending to the base noun, not the adjective. That’s how we get solicitors general and notaries public.

English pronouns also tend to take adjectives postpositively. The box contained nothing useful. They wanted to see something beautiful.

Breaking the usual adjective/noun structure is sometimes done in poetry to aid meter or rhyme or for stylistic reasons. Think of the poem “Harlem” by Langston Hughes, in which he writes, “What happens to a dream deferred?” What a difference it would make to say, “What happens to a deferred dream?”

In the American Heritage Dictionary, if an adjective is commonly used postpositively, we typically show that by including illustrations or quotations after the definition.

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