The Genesis of Complex Sentences

Even if we disregard all those nominal expressions employed with purely connotative meaning, that is, those which do not refer to any object, and confine our attention to nouns which are names of things, it is clear that no extant lexicon contains anywhere near enough expressions of this kind to suffice even for ordinary daily life. We cannot get along with any single common noun to refer to a familiar object, but must have at every moment modifiers with which to construct new, more complex names to use for all the specific instances of that object which we encounter and talk about [p. xvii].