| 词组 | attributive |
| 释义 | attributive Attributive is an adjective that describes the position of a modifier directly in front of the word it modifies: black tie, silly remark, big toe, kitchen sink, lobster salad, computer terminal. That nouns can function like adjectives in this position is a feature of English noticed as long ago as Lindley Murray 1795. He mentions two-word compounds of which the first element is a noun, and notices that they are sometimes open (he cites adjective pronoun, silver watch, stone cistern), hyphened (he cites coal-mine, corn-mill, fruit-tree), and solid (he cites honeycomb, gingerbread, inkhorn). John Simon, in Michaels & Ricks 1980, objects to the combination language deterioration; Simon says deterioration of language would be better (he does not, however, mention that language change is used in the same paragraph). A combination like language deterioration (or language change) is not quite the animal that Lindley Murray was talking about in 1795; Murray's combinations we would call compounds, some of them self-explanatory. Combinations like language deterioration represent simply the free modification of one noun by another. Otto Jespersen, in the second volume of his seven-volume grammar ( 1909-49), comments on this characteristic of the language; he attributes both compound-forming and free modification to "the want in English of an adequate manner of forming adjectives from substantives to denote the vague relations indicated by Latin -alis, -anus, etc." The formation of compounds from one noun annexed to another goes back to Old English, where it was the standard way of forming compounds. The noun attributive as a free modifier of another noun appears to be somewhat more recent: Jespersen's examples mostly start with Shakespeare, but he has few examples between Shakespeare and the 19th century. The practice, then, may be a revival. At any rate it is flourishing now. A single page of a journal (EDF Letter, May 1986, a newsletter for people interested in environmental issues) yields these examples: beef industry, health aspects, beef consumption, beef production, bank and government funds, bank policies, rain forest work, board member, ecology subjects, Home Loan Bank, Reagan Administration, U.S.-Panama Commission, Santa Margarita River Foundation, San Diego investment counseling firm, brokerage and venture capital business. And there are compounds too, of course: rain forest, field guide. And the ordinary reader will find these understandable and will probably not notice them as being in the least out of the ordinary. Quinn 1980 gives some long strings of attributive nouns from a single picture caption in a 1980 Philadelphia newspaper: "the Chapel of the Four Chaplains Annual Awards Banquet" at which "the Rabbi Louis Paris Hall of Heroes Gold Medallion" was awarded to "Former NATO commander Alexander M. Haig Jr." Quinn's strings raise two minor questions concerning attributive nouns. The first is the use of the plural noun as an attributive: Awards Banquet. Both Foster 1968 and Safire 1982 have comments on the subject. It seems that the norm has been to have singular nouns used as attributives—billiards, for instance, even lost its -s to give us billiard ball and billiard table. What seems to be a fairly recent trend toward using plural attributives in contemporary English has attracted some attention and raised a few eyebrows. Of course there always had been a few plural attributives—scissors grinder, physics laboratory, Civil Liberties Union, mathematics book—but what about the apparently sudden influx of weapons system, communications technology, operations program, systems analyst, earth-resources satellite, singles bar, enemies list? The answer appears to be that such plural attributives are standard. Many of these combinations come from specialized fields of endeavor, and the plural form seems to be chosen to differentiate the meaning of the combination with the plural from whatever the singular attributive might connote. In more general cases, like that of awards banquet, perhaps the intent is simply to stress plurality: more than one award will be presented. The second question is represented by "Former NATO commander Alexander M. Haig Jr." The attributive descriptor "former NATO commander" is a journalistic device probably intended to compress information into a minimum amount of space. It is common in picture captions (as in this case) and in news articles, where it appears to be a basic tenet of journalism that no reader will remember who a public figure is from one day to the next. There are various objections to the practice but the chief one—that such strings are hard to understand—is patently off-base. You will find a brief, more general discussion under false titles. |
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