Current English Studies

To fashion's delight and men's despair, women and foundation garments have been inseparable for years. Feast or famine, thick or thin (mostly thin) they have clung to each other, lending ironclad support here (with a corset), whaleboned comfort there, out-and-out camouflage as far as the eye could see. Trouble was, the eye could never see far enough to know for sure there the padding left off and the girls began.
(Mar. 19'65-Modern Living)
The above is only the beginning of an article picked out at random. No ordinary articles in newspapers or magazines are written this way. This is peculiar to Time magazine which entertains so great a popularity the world over.
From my constant reading of the magazine, I have come to realize that there is something which constitutes the peculiar style of Time. The following is an interim report of my study of what makes up its peculiar style. I think this might be called Sophisticated Style.

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The word 'Adjectival' in the title means the modifier of a noun. In other words, it's equal to a 'noun-cluster'which Paul Roberts used in his book, “Patterns of English”, or, C.T. Onion's' adjective equivalent '. To be concrete, it contains 'article, adjective, noun, possessive, gerund, adverb, present participle, past participle, prepositional phrase, participial phrase, infinitive phrase, and clause '. In this presentation I try to indicate how these adjectivals are combined with a head-word noun, and how we can clear up the ambiguity in its surface structure by classifying its deep structure.
In'greater car safety ' and 'Social Security benefits ', the surface structure of the two is 'adj. +noun +noun '. But, the adjective ' greater ' of the former modifies 'car safety ' and the noun ' car ' modifies the noun 'safety '. On the other hand, the adjective 'Social' of the latter modifies the noun 'Security ', and 'Social Security ' modifies the noun ' benefits '. That is to say, the adjectival-noun combinations in the form of a n N, ¹⁾ though they have the same surface structure, have the different deep structure from each other. So, by pursuing these adjectival-noun combinations and, if any, ambiguities theoretically, I'm going to show you the hypothetical basic rules of these combinations. I made use of the four editorials of the New York Times Weekly Review, April 1966, and picked up all the adjectival-nouns, which I found to amount to about 900. Now I'll show you the Basic Rules.

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