MULTIPLE CLASSIFIERS
Classifiers are related by coordination or dependency. A lot is left implicit in classifier + noun combinations, and with more than two elements the complexity increases.
Related by coordination
The History and Geography Faculty Apple and blackberry tart
The Management and Finance Committee A plane and coach trip
The singular head noun indicates that there is only one Faculty, committee, tart and trip, each of a dual kind. Ambiguity may arise if the head noun is plural. For example, ‘plane and coach trips’ could refer to several trips of a plane + coach type, or to plane trips separate from coach trips, analyzed as: [[plane and coach] trips] or [[plane] and [coach] trips]], respectively.
Related by dependency
Sequences of two classifiers can occur before a noun head, as in the following:
chrome bathroom fittings
Madrid terrorist bombings
In these examples the semantic relations can be inferred directly as increasing dependency from the head noun towards the left. That is, chrome modifies bathroom fittings, not bathroom, and Madrid, in the actual sense used, modified the terrorist bombings. This combination is ambiguous, however, as another reading could be ‘bombings by Madrid terrorists’.
It is common, then, to find combinations in which either the classifier or the head is itself sub-modified, or rather, sub-classified, as in the following examples:
Sub-modified classifier Sub-modified head
dining-car service pocket address book
state school pupils The Observer book reviews
two-litre plastic jug Italian graduate students
Such combinations reflect cultural realities. In everyday contexts as well as in more specialized areas of knowledge and activity, there is a tendency in English to ‘encapsulate’ experiences, devices and phenomena of all kinds into short but complex NGs. The ‘telescoped’ effect of such ordered sequences means that, on a first encounter, not only non-native speakers but also natives sometimes have to put in some inferencing to work out the semantic relations.
In medical, political and other institutionalized contexts, the NG is often represented as an acronym, that is, initial letters which themselves are pronounced as a word, or, if that is not possible, as initials:
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
AIDS Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
TEFL Teaching English as a Foreign Language
VIP Very Important Person
Note that with reference to the AIDS sequence, ‘Acquired’ does not modify ‘Immune’ but ‘Immune Deficiency’.
