Modification: an overview

modify

This guide pulls together parts from various other guides to give you an overview of what modification is and how it works with various word classes and phrase types.
This guide is linked from both the in-service and the initial plus sections of the site and there's a reason for that:
For people on or who have recently completed initial training courses, this may be all you want to know for now.
For more experienced teachers considering going on to or currently taking further training, this provides a road map of the area from which you can select where to go to learn more.
For more information on specific areas, refer to the list of links to related guides at the end.

What is modification and why is it important?

Modification involves changes and refinements to items in the language. For example, this is a more or less unmodified sentence:
The man bought the house
There's nothing grammatically or communicatively wrong with this sentence, of course, because it is well formed and tells the reader / hearer what happened and who did what to what. However, it lacks detail and is much less effective than, for example:
The young man with the flashy car immediately bought the woman's old house on the corner of our street.
The second sentence contains a good deal of modification to change and refine the data. We now know:

what sort of man (young)
something about the man (with the flashy car)
how he bought (immediately)
whose house (the woman's)
what sort of house (old)
where the house is (on the corner)
of what (our street)

and by a process of quite simple modification, we have added seven new pieces of information to the basic sentence.
How we do that and a good deal more is the subject of this guide.

We said above that the initial sentence was more or less unmodified and that is true because, in fact, there are three modifications even in that very basic sentence:

the noun man is modified by the determiner the which tells us that it is a particular man
the verb buy is inflected (irregularly) to tell us that the even occurred at a specific time in the past
the noun house is modified by the same determiner, the, to tell us that we are referring to a specific house

This guide will deal with the sorts of modifications set out in a. to g. above rather than concern itself with determiners and verb inflexions.

A note about terminology

There is a distinction between the terms qualifier and modifier which we should pause to get clear:

A modifier is any item which adds information to the head of a phrase so, for example:
1. ancient Greek
  contains a pre-modifying adjective
2. many people
  contains a pre-modifying quantifier
3. the woman in the hat
  contains a post-modifying prepositional phrase
4. the really cheap option
  contains both a pre-modifying adverb and a pre-modifying adjective
5. the people involved
  contains a post-modifying adjective
A qualifier is an item which adds information to the head of a noun phrase only so, for example:
1. her money
  contains a pre-modifying qualifier possessive determiner
2. the people from that department
  contains a pre-modifying definite article determiner and a post-modifying prepositional phrase.

To complicate matters slightly, however, functional grammarians (following Halliday) reserve the term modifier for pre-modifying elements and use the term qualifier only for post-modifying elements.
Simple.

	Modifying nouns
an independent dog on the road

The simplest way to modify a noun is to use an adjective, of course, and we can usually do that two ways:

Attributively
Usually that means placing the adjective before the noun with no intervening verb so we have
    The old house
    The ridiculous idea
    The current president
etc.
Sometimes, with certain adjectives, an attributive use may follow the noun with no intervening verb so we can have:
    The newspaper proper
    The officer concerned
    The president elect
etc.
Predicatively
This means that the noun is the subject of the sentence and the adjective follows in the predicate, after a verb, as in:
    The house seemed cosy
    The people became frightened
    The door is blue
etc.

Nouns can also be modified by placing items before them which are not adjectives per se but which function in similar ways. In older analyses, these were often explicitly called adjectives as in, for example, possessive adjectives and so on. More modern analyses call these determiners of one kind or another because they determine how the hearer / reader perceives the noun phrase.
For example:

articles: a house vs. the house
demonstratives: this / that / these those house(s)
quantifiers: some / a few / many / most houses
partitives: a row / an avenue / a cluster etc. of houses
interrogatives: which houses / whose houses etc.
possessives: our houses / their houses / my house etc.

The other way to modify nouns is more complex and involves post-modifying the noun. Four important ways to do this are:

prepositional phrases: the house on the corner
the man with the red jacket
the woman in the office
the house near the station
a city in the north
etc.
relative pronoun clauses: the house which we lived in
the man whose car was damaged
the woman who bought the tickets
the house that stands near the station
etc.
relative adverb clauses: the place where we ate
the day when we met
the reason why she spoke up
that was how we arrived at the figure
non-finite clauses (-ing clauses or infinitive clauses): the pub standing near the river
the best place to see the action
etc.

Rarely, a noun phrase may be modified by an adverb as in, for example:
    That was quite a party
    It was rather a mess
    She is such a fool

	Modifying verbs
carefully going down

The most obvious way to modify a verb is to use an adverb as in the example above, where there are two: carefully and down. Both words alter how we see, i.e., modify, the verb go.
There is a distinction between an adverb and an adverbial, however, which is explained in more detail elsewhere. Briefly, any word or phrase that alters how we see a verb is an adverbial and that includes the word class of adverbs. Although all adverbs are adverbials, not all adverbials are adverbs.
Here, we will consider the two major types only. There is much more detail in the guides linked at the end.

Adverbs as adverbials:
1. Adverbs of manner, answering the question 'How?'
  so we get, e.g.
      He is cycling quickly
      She is thinking hard
      The children are waiting patiently
  etc.
2. Adverbs of place, answering the question 'Where?'
  so we get, e.g.
  They are waiting outside
  I walked everywhere
  etc.
3. Adverbs of time, answering the question 'When?' or 'How often?'
  so we get, e.g.
      They are enjoying it now
      She is going home tomorrow
      The boss sometimes arrives late
  etc.
4. Adverbs of degree, answering the question 'How much?'
  so we get, e.g.
  She enjoyed it enormously
  I hated it intensely
  etc.

As you can see from these examples, not all adverbs end in -ly (although hundreds do) and it's also worth noting that not all words which end in -ly are adverbs so, for example, friendly looks like an adverb but is actually an adjective. There is a list of over 100 of these in the guide to adjectives, linked below.

Other items as adverbials:
1. Manner:
  1. Clauses, e.g.:
    Smiling happily, he collected the money
  2. Prepositional phrases, e.g.:
    They spoke in Italian
    With a grin, he told her the story
2. Place:
  1. Clauses, e.g.:
    I ate well while I was in Italy
  2. Noun phrases, e.g.:
    She stayed a week
  3. Prepositional phrases, e.g.:
    She climbed down the mountain
3. Time:
  1. Clauses, e.g.:
    She arrived before everyone else
  2. Noun phrases, e.g.:
    They came last year
  3. Prepositional phrases, e.g.:
    The post arrived in the morning
4. Reason:
  1. Clauses, e.g.:
    They did it because I asked
  2. Infinitive clauses, e.g.:
    They are trying to get a medal

	Modifying adverbs
climbing extremely skilfully

Adverbs themselves may, of course, be modified in a number of ways, one of which is exemplified above and called an intensifier because it alters the strength of the adverb skilfully. When an adverb modifies another, it must function as an intensifier. There are two essential forms of intensifying adverbs:

Amplifiers, which make the adverb stronger. For example:
    It was very carefully done
    She arrived extremely late
    They argued totally stupidly
    She climbed very quickly
Emphasisers which often express the speaker / writer's view. For example:
    That was simply deliciously cooked
    He drove plainly insanely
    She spoke even more loudly
Downtoners, which diminish the strength of the adverb. For example:
    It was quite well done
    She rather stupidly got on the wrong train
    She spoke fairly excitedly
    The worked relatively slowly

The term intensifier is not, incidentally, synonymous with amplifier because it can also refer to a downtoner.

Adverbs in a phrasal verb are rarely modified at all because the convention is to modify the whole of the verb phrase so we prefer:
    He quickly grew up
rather than:
    *He grew quickly up
and
    He immediately looked up the word
rather than:
    *He looked immediately up the word
although, rarely, we may allow something like:
    She spoke right out

	Modifying adjectives
she became volcanically angry

The normal way to modify an adjective is with an adverb and, again, the usual categorisation is of various forms of intensifiers which affect the strength of the adjective one way or another.

Amplifiers which increase the power of the adjective:
    That was incredibly stupid
    She was very happy
    Her dog was very friendly
    The house was dreadfully dilapidated
Downtoners which reduce the power of the adjective:
    That was rather silly
    She was slightly confident
    The animal was reasonably tame
Viewpoint adverbs, expressing the scope of the adjective, are a rarer class:
    This is technically possible
    She was morally unfit to govern
    They were financially independent
Attitudinal adverbs express the speaker / writer's view. For example:
    He is obviously right
    She is definitely wrong
    That is patently untrue
    This is clearly inaccurate

A small class of adverb modifiers for adjectives needs special attention:

enough: always follows the adjective it modifies so we can have, for example:
The food was hot enough
but not
*The food was enough hot
too: is always an intensifier and often followed by a clause implying a consequence:
The food was too hot to eat
We had too little money for the fare
so: is also an intensifier which is almost always followed by a that- consequence clause (which may be implied rather than stated):
It was so good that I had three helpings
The weather was so beautiful that we stayed another week
a small class of constrained adverb modifies: these modifiers are confined to certain adjectives and can be learned and taught as fixed expressions or chunks of language. For example:
    The dog was fast / sound asleep
    The ship was hard aground
    He is stone deaf
    The food was stone cold

	Modifying prepositional phrases
right on the edge of the cliff

Some intensifying adverbs can modify prepositional phrases. For example:
    She is dead against the idea
    They are nearly over the worst
    It is just next to the post office, directly opposite the station
    They live right by the river
    Was nearly after dark when they arrived
    His explanation went completely over my head
    They were very nearly on time
    It was way over my head
    The stone went clean through the window
    The meeting started shortly after 6 o'clock.
    The man spoke purely in his own interests.
    They acted solely to their own advantage
    That's a comment very much out of order here.
    We looked all over the town for a replacement.

That's almost a complete list, by the way.

Now use the menu below to go to any area that interests you to learn more.

Related guides
noun post-modification	a guide to the ways nouns can be modified by what follows them
noun pre-modification	a guide to the ways nouns can be modified by what precedes them
determiners	for an analysis of how determiners operate with various types of nouns
prepositional phrases	a guide dedicated to a major way of modifying verb and noun phrases
relative pronoun clauses	a guide to a common way to post-modify noun phrases
relative adverb clauses	the other common way to modify noun phrases
adverbs	a guide focusing on a particular type of adverbial
adverbials	a guide explaining adjuncts, disjuncts and conjuncts
adjectives	the guide to this word class
syntax index	for links to other related areas

Modification: an overview

What is modification and why is it important?

A note about terminology

Modifying nouns

Modifying verbs

Modifying adverbs

Modifying adjectives

Modifying prepositional phrases