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3. By numerals, ordinal or cardinal, which state the number or order, or serve to identify
persons or non-persons, as in:
He arrived just three weeks ago.
Robert has always been the first boy in his class.
Is it part two of the book?
4. By (a) nouns in the common case singular or (b) prepositional
nominal phrases, which characterize the person or non-person either qualitatively or from the point of
view of its locative, temporal, or other features.
The nouns are always premodifying attributes, the prepositional nominal phrases are post modifying:
a) It happened on a December evening (декабрьский вечер).
The boy started to eat a ham roll (булочка с ветчиной).
The garden wall was almost ruined (садовая стена).
There was a honeymoon couple among the passengers (пара, проводящая медовый месяц).
b) The new secretary, on promotion from the general office, was a widow of fifty.
He was a man of very regular habits.
Anything of interest this morning, Miss Lemon?
In some cases the attribute and its headword form a closely connected unit, such as the continent of Europe
(Европейский континент), the name of Brighton Kurby (имя Брайтон К¸рби), the village of Crowie (деревня
Кроул). Although the prepositional group is a subordinate and characterizing element, modifying the first
word, its informative value is much greater than that of the first element.
In structures of this type the semantic roles of the elements may be reversed: the first (subordinating)
element becomes a modifying word, the second (subordinated) - the modified one, as in:
his carrot of a nose (нос морковкой; не нос, а морковка),
an angel of a girl (не девушка, а ангел),
a hell of a noise (адский шум, шум как в аду),
a jewel of a nature (золотой характер; не характер, а золото).
Though logically his carrot of a nose means that the nose is characterized as resembling a carrot,
syntactically it is the word carrot that is modified by the of-phrase of a nose, the indefinite article performing
its usual classifying function. The modified word is not always semantically acceptable as part of the sentence
without the of-phrase, which shows the semantic dependence of the modified element on the modifying one.
This, together with the fact that logical and syntactic relations are reversed, accounts for the marked stylistic
effect of these structures.
His left hand was holding a skyscraper of a silver cup.
High above the bank is another eagle’s nest of a castle.
Russian phrases of a similar kind - не девка, а огонь; не ребенок, а сущий дьяволенок, unlike the parallel
English phrases, are rarely included in extended sentences.
Note:
Phrases like sort of tired (I feel sort of tired), kind of tiresome (The situation becomes kind of tiresome), etc.,
form one syntactic whole and cannot be treated as free syntactic phrases consisting of a headword modified by
a prepositional attribute. The first element expresses approximation - a moderate degree of the quality denoted.
5. By nouns or pronouns in the genitive case.
He caught the sound of the children’s voices.