Restrictive nominal and adjectival post-modification of English nouns with general reference

Abstract

Focusing on constructions consisting of a generic head noun post-modified by a noun or adjective with no complementation (e.g., all things morphology / American ), this chapter explores their attested phraseological encoding (with the help of corpus data) and their perceived naturalness (with elicited data). In the corpus data, the construction was attested mostly with two head nouns ( things and matters ), but combined with varied nominal/adjectival post-modifiers. In the elicited data, participants most often rated instances of the construction as natural when post-modified by classifying adjectives. They interpreted it as a restrictive expression identifying a category of entities (e.g., ‘all head-noun that are (relevant to)/(like) post-modifier ’). The corpus data also showed that the all  + head-noun element may be coercively reinterpreted as an intensifier like very when accompanied by a descriptive-evaluative adjectival post-modifier.