Explaining Heads and Modifiers

Heads and Modifiers

In group of words, usually known as phrase. *head is one word. Just like #TheCore, It shows what the phrase is talking about. In other side, *modifier is an additional information about the head. Please see the example in “Blue apple” phrase below.

 

In other word, Miller stated that, “If we think of language as a way of conveying information –which is what every speaker does with language some of the time – we can consider the head as conveying a central piece of information and the modifiers as conveying extra information.”

A phrase may contains more than one modifier, for example; long black hair. In addition, head and modifiers are not always noun and adjective but it can be the other word which has different part of speech, for example in phrase house on the corner.

According to modifier placement, there are two kind of modifier. They are, pre-modifier and post-modifier. From two phrases before we can see that the modifiers placed before the head (long black hair) and after the head (house on the corner). If the modifier placed before the head, it call pre-modifier. Contrary, modifier that appear after the head call post-modifier.

long black hair

house on the corner

In addition, the head also can modify by pre-, and post- modifiers at the same time.

 

house on the corner

Complement and adjunct

 Before we continue this lesson, please see this sentence.

beautiful girl on the corner

As we know, there are some kinds of verb (transitive, intransitive, ditransitive, Intransitive locational, transitive directional, and copula). If we talk about complement and adjunct, it means we will talk about transitive verb (direct object-NP following the verb). Verb such as *leave is require a noun to their right. Without it, the clause in which they occur is incomplete and the message conveyed by the clause is incomplete for speakers of English.

The term ‘complement’ derives from a Latin verb ‘to fill’; the idea conveyed by ‘complement’ is that a complement expression fills out the verb (or noun and so on), filling it out or completing it with respect to syntax but also with respect to meaning. The term ‘adjunct’ derives from the Latin verb ‘join’ or ‘add’ and simply means ‘something adjoined’, tacked on and not part of the essential structure of clauses.),( Miller, 2002: 92).

In simple way, we can conclude that complement is word for completing the meaning of a sentence with transitive verb. While adjunct is additional information in a sentence which is mean it is *optional.