The meaning of the referring item in this category (most commonly a definite article, occasionally a pronoun or a determiner) is specified by a pre- or post-modifier, or a combination of post-modifiers. Although a prepositional phrase following a noun may be its complement or an adverbial, if it is a complement, it usually specifies the reference of the referring item. In possessive constructions (B1), the definite article is almost never cohesive (e.g., the predictions below), only the definite possessor NP (the SBF) establishes a cohesive tie with its full form in sentence 4:

 

If the first definite is cohesive in a construction, it is usually also indicated by a modifier. It is very rare, that the possessed refers, but it happens:

 

Likewise, the possessed is usually cohesive with a demonstrative pronoun:

 

(The examples above are based on RA10, but some sentences are slightly altered to illustrate the phenomena discussed.)

 

Adjectival pre-modifiers and participial adjectives as pre-modifiers (B2) function similarly to relative clauses in describing or classifying the entity denoted by the head noun (Biber et al., 1991, 97). If the noun phrase contains a pre-modifier, it is usually helpful to paraphrase it to see that it is not cohesive:

 

Participial adjectives (e.g., interesting, lasting) as pre-modifiers can often be paraphrased by “a relative clause of the form ‘who/which be + verb-ing’ or ‘who/which verb(s/ed)’” (Biber et al., 1991, 68). This test shows two important things: one is that these participial adjectives are not to be confused with nominal pre-modifiers, and the other is that they have the property of being able to specify the reference of the subsequent noun phrase – as would be the case if they were presented in the form of a relative clause. For these reasons, nouns specified by a pre-modifying participial adjective are very likely to be non-cohesive.

 

A relative clause is “characteristically a post-modifier in a noun phrase” (Biber, et al., 1991, 195). The “relativizer” (a wh-word or that) points back to the head of the noun phrase to establish the reference of the noun phrase, instead of giving only additional information as in non-restrictive (or non-defining) relative clauses. For this reason, definite nouns followed by a restrictive relative clause will usually be non-referential. In the same way as nouns, pronouns may also refer forward to relative clauses, as in, for example: He who must not be named.

Such infinitive clauses with possessive pronouns specify the meaning of the noun only, while retaining cohesive reference to the person/people referred to, as in: