Garonne (garonne) wrote in linguaphiles,
Garonne
garonne
linguaphiles

adjective and noun - order inversion

As a native English speaker (more or less), I have a gut feeling that some adjectives come after the noun in English, and not before. Here are a few examples that sound wrong to me, and what I might replace them with.

as shown by the mentioned study -> as shown by the study mentioned previously/above
the considered topics -> the topics considered here/the topics under consideration
the investigated characters -> the characters investigated here

My questions are:

1. Am I right? I see examples of the 'wrong' usage (from non-native English speakers) so often that I'm starting to doubt myself.
2. I feel like the corrections I propose above are unbalanced unless I add some sort of adverb at the end (above, here, previously etc.) So we've got a 'noun + adjective + adverb' construction instead of the usual 'adjective + noun'. Anyone have any idea why this is the case?
3. Why can't we use these adjectives before a noun anyway? Is it because they're all in fact past participles?

I never even NOTICED this until recently, but now it's driving me crazy...
Tags: english, grammar
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