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I got stuck with this sentence 'This is also a period of enormous physical change and adolescents experience changes in their physical development at a rate unparalleled since infancy.'. I am confused about why the adjective 'unparalleled' is put behind the noun'rate'. Are there any special functions or meanings? And can anybody tell me how to analyse this structure grammatically? Thanks a lot.

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  • If you wanted to put the adjective before the noun, it would have to be the whole adjective. It might look a bit "forced", but native speakers certainly wouldn't argue with the syntactic validity of ...at an unparalleled-since-infancy rate (the hyphens are just an orthographic courtesy to help the reader parse the utterance correctly).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jan 11, 2023 at 12:52

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The whole phrase unparalleled since infancy describes rate. (Their bodies change at a faster rate than they have experienced since they were babies.)

The sentence wouldn't make sense if the phrase was split up in order to put the adjective before the noun.

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This sentence is an example of whiz-deletion, where a relative pronoun and be-verb are omitted from a relative clause. Here is the sentence with the relative pronoun and be-verb present:

This is also a period of enormous physical change and adolescents experience changes in their physical development at a rate which is unparalleled since infancy.

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    Thank you so much！ I think I made a mistake. I separated the word 'unparalleled' and the phrase 'since infancy' , so it led to my misunderstanding.
    – kungno
    Commented Jan 21, 2023 at 19:38

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