), the postpositive placement of adjectives is the normal syntax, but in English it is largely confined to archaic and poetic uses (e.g., "Once upon a midnight dreary", as opposed to "Once upon a dreary midnight") as well as phrases borrowed from Romance languages or Latin (e.g., heir apparent, aqua regia) and certain fixed grammatical constructions (e.g., "Those anxious to leave soon exited").
Adjectives must appear postpositively in English when they qualify almost all compound and some simple indefinite pronouns:[1] some/any/no/every...thing/one/body/where, those; Examples: We need someone strong; those well-baked; Going anywhere nice?
Present and past participles exhibit this behavior, as in all those entering should ..., one of the men executed was ..., but at will this can be considered to be a verbal rather than adjectival use (a kind of reduced relative clause).
Similar behavior is displayed by many adjectives with the suffix -able or -ible (e.g. the best room available, the only decision possible, the worst choice imaginable, the persons liable).
Certain other adjectives with a sense similar to those in the foregoing categories are customarily found postpositively (all the people present, the first payment due).
Consider the following examples: The postpositive in the second sentence is expected to refer to the stars that are visible here and now; that is, it expresses a stage-level predicate.
The prepositive in the first sentence may also have that sense, but it may also have an individual-level meaning, referring to an inherent property of the object (the stars that are visible in general).
Quite a significant difference in meaning is found with the adjective responsible: Used prepositively, can you direct me to the responsible people?, it strongly connotes "dedicated" or "reliable", and by use of the heavily conditional "should be" it denotes that, otherwise, as in the second sentence, it denotes the far more commonly used meaning in the 21st century of "at fault" or "guilty" unless the qualifying word for is added.
Phrases with postpositive adjectives are sometimes used with archaic effect, as in things forgotten, words unspoken, dreams believed, Flame Imperishable.
Phrases which reverse the normal word order are quite common in poetry, usually to fit the meter or rhyme, as with "fiddlers three" (from Old King Cole) or "forest primeval" (from Evangeline), though word order was less important in Early Modern English and earlier forms of English.
Similar examples exist for possessive adjectives, as in "O Mistress Mine" (a song in Act II, Scene 3 of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night).
Examples: Apocalypse Now Redux, "Bad Moon Rising", Body Electric, Brideshead Revisited, Chicken Little, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, A Dream Deferred, Hannibal Rising, Hercules Unchained, House Beautiful, Jupiter Ascending, The Life Aquatic, A Love Supreme, The Matrix Reloaded, Monsters Unleashed, Orpheus Descending, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Prometheus Unbound, "The Road Not Taken", Sonic Unleashed, To a God Unknown, Tarzan Triumphant, Time Remembered, The World Unseen, Enemy Mine.
By contrast, prepositional phrases, adverbs of location, etc., as well as relative clauses, come after the nouns they modify: the elephant in the room; all the people here; the woman to whom you spoke.
Other phrases remain as they are because they intrinsically use a plural construction (and have no singular form), such as eggs Benedict, nachos supreme, Brothers Grimm, Workers United.