Noun groups

Describers before classifiers: Enormous caterpillar tractors

You can combine describers and classifiers, but the describer almost always comes before the classifier.

Soon, two enormous caterpillar tractors with mechanical shovels on their front ends came clanking into the wood.

The Fantastic Mr Fox(1970)

Soon, three huge fire trucks with mechanical shovels on their front ends came clanking into the wood.

Soon, a dozen creaking service wagons with mechanical shovels on their front ends came clanking into the wood.

Soon, over a hundred deadly killer robots with mechanical shovels on their front ends came clanking into the wood.

Here's a little bit of speculation if you're interested: one theory as to why the words in a noun group appear in this order is that each word indicates an increasingly fixed quality of the thing.

Consider this noun group:

Those five noisy police cars

If you work backwards:

  • Cars—more or less fixed quality; hard to change them from being cars to being someting else
  • Police—pretty fixed quality, though if you sold the cars and repainted them they'd stop being police cars
  • Noisy—less fixed, maybe the noisiness depends on how they are being driven, and the subjective opinion of the person speaking this sentence
  • Five—not fixed at all, there can be many different numbers of police cars
  • Those—this pointer has nothing to do with the cars but is instead a word about the speaker's relationship to the cars (implying a distance from the cars)

It's a slippery concept, but you can see that the closer you get to the main noun, the more the words have to do with a fixed aspect of the thing itself, while the further away the more they have to do with the speaker or writer.

Write your own variation. What came clanking into the wood?
Write another variation, but this time put the describer and classifier in the wrong order.
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