Name modifiers alter nouns to make them more expressive. They can come before or after a noun and include articles, adjectives, or demonstratives. Punctuation and hyphenation depend on the position of the modifier. Long clauses can also act as modifiers. The best position for a modifier depends on the sentence construction.
Name modifiers have one important job: to make names more expressive. Illustrated by the word “important” in the previous sentence, this type of word comes in various forms, all with a particular way of altering the nouns associated with them. A noun modifier can precede or follow a noun. It could include complicated polysyllabic adjectives or just an article like “a” or a demonstrative like “those.”
A noun can have a pre-modifier noun or adjective, or it could include the noun modifier afterwards. This alteration will often change the item used. For example, the article “an” in the sentence “an aimless sentence” changes to “a” when the modifier changes position – “an aimless sentence”.
Another noun, multiple nouns, or an adjective can serve as a noun modifier. It would be grammatically correct to call something “vanilla ice cream,” “vanilla ice cream,” and even “melted vanilla ice cream.” When modifiers come after the noun, words like “that” or “of” are added as appendages. “Melted vanilla ice cream” becomes “melted vanilla ice cream” or even “melted vanilla ice cream along the wrist and on the floor”.
Punctuation often depends on how a noun is modified, taking into account the number of modifiers and their position in the sentence. When nouns contain more than one word, they usually aren’t hyphenated, as in “ice cream.” Conversely, when nouns or adjectives modify another noun at the beginning of a sentence, they usually take a hyphen. The phrase “ice cream sandwich” should have a hyphen to hold the words together.
Not only articles and short sentences can act as a noun modifier, but also long and elongated clauses. These modifier chains are held together by words such as “on”, “over”, “from” or “of” and descriptors that can provide other types of key information, such as “who” and “where”. This is an example of a noun and its modifier: “. . . the starred chef who works in his mother’s cellar with two pots, a frying pan and a slew of family recipes”.
Depending on the construction of a sentence, a noun modifier will be better suited for position before or after a particular noun. The first time, for example, it might be better to tell someone, “Don’t touch this big red button.” If the message doesn’t send correctly, the second time around it might be slightly different: “Don’t touch the button it’s big and red.”
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