Modifier / Modification / Pre-modification / Post-modification
Modification describes the grammatical process through which the meaning of a head word within a phrase can be altered, refined or modified. This is done by the addition of one or more words. The result of the modification of a word is the creation of a phrase e.g. in the noun phrase, ‘A criminal act’, the head word (the noun ‘act’) is modified by the noun ‘criminal’.
Nouns can be both pre-modified (by linking with one or more adjectives, e.g. A tall dark stranger’ or with other nouns, e.g. ‘oven glove’) as well as post-modified, e.g. ‘The man with an ice-cream. Prepositional phrases can also act as modifiers when they act as the complement of a verb, as in, ‘He’s in a mess’.
