な-Adjective + Noun - Grammar Discussion

Grammar Points
#1

な-Adjective + Noun, Describing a noun

Structure
［な］Adjective + な + Noun

Examples:
静か + な + 夜
元気 + な + 子供

View on Bunpro

#2

For this example sentence:

それは大切なベンおじさんの言葉です。

I thought because 大切 comes immediately before the noun ベンおじさん , that was the noun it would modify; i.e. “the words of dear uncle Ben”.
But the translation suggests 大切 is actually modifying 言葉 here?

Those are the important words of uncle Ben.

Does that mean a な adjective can modify a noun without being directly attached to the beginning of that noun? I thought to get “important words” you’d need to write the above sentence more like this to get that translation:

それはベンおじさんの大切な言葉です。

Am I missing something?

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#3

Hi!

The way I interpret the sentence is that の is acting as a nominalizer, the whole thing ベンおじさんの言葉 behaves like a noun, in other words, the noun in this sentence is “the words of uncle Ben” and that is what is being modified.

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#4

Ahh, ok. I didn’t realize の worked that way. So instead of this…

(大切なベンおじさん)の言葉

It’s closer to this?

大切な(ベンおじさんの言葉)

I’ll have to keep an eye out for that kind of pattern in the future :slightly_smiling_face:
Thank you for the reply!

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#5

Hi,
I came to post the same question.

I have read the above explanation, but i don’t think “no” is acting like a nominaliser for two reasons .

  1. Uncle Ben is already a noun and doesn’t need nominalising.
  2. The “no” is more likely referring to the words as being Uncle Ben’s.

DeepL also translates the sentence as being the words of dear Uncle Ben. Not that this is the final word in translation, but it seems that is the most obvious one.

There is no further explanation regarding this sentence in Bunpro, where it is the only sentence in this entry where the adj+na is not directly in front of what it is modifying.

Either this is a confusing translation, or is it just wrong?

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#6

Hi @byrd9999 ! This の wouldn’t be a nominalizer but rather be a possessive marker as you mentioned.

Depending on the context, we can interpret it as either ‘Those are Uncle Ben’s important words’ or ‘Those are dear Uncle Ben’s words’. That said, without additional context, the more common interpretation feels like the former, with the な-adjective 大切な modifying the noun phrase ベンおじさんの言葉. This is because 大切な言葉 is a more natural collocation than 大切なベンおじさん. If you want to say ‘dear Uncle Ben’, you would normally add 私の to 大切な to make it clear, like 私の大切なベンおじさん.

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#7

Thanks for the reply :slight_smile:

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