Question: This British article titled "[Two stabbings near Crumpsall Park overnight in separate incidents just 200 metres apart](https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/two-stabbings-near-crumpsall-park-16367917)" says:

> 
> He was taken to hospital with serious injuries. Police described his condition **today** as serious but stable.
> 
> 
> 

In the second sentence, what does 'today' modify, 'described' or 'condition'?

If it modifies the noun 'condition', what's the part of speech of 'today'?

Answer: 
In the example *today* is a clause-level adjunct that modifies the entire clause:

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dPbcb.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dPbcb.png)

Words do not modify words; syntactic constituents modify other syntactic constituents. Do not get hung up on word order. Temporal adjuncts in English have flexible placement: they can come before, after, or at appropriate spots within the clause they modify. So *today* could be placed before *police*, after *police*, after *serious*, or after *condition*, and the sentence would have the same underlying grammatical structure.

If it was necessary to draw a distinction between the time of description and the time that the description referred to, then the sentence would have been phrased differently. Meaning is as vague as it's allowed to be in the context.
> 
> In the second sentence, what does 'today' modify, 'described' or 'condition'?
> 
> 
> 

It modifies *condition*.

> 
> If it modifies the noun 'condition', what's the part of speech of 'today'?
> 
> 
> 

An adverb.

[Adverbs modifying nouns is a thing](https://english.stackexchange.com/a/414344/171986). (See [pp. 42 ff. here](http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/PaynHuddPull.pdf) for more details.)

Essentially, the *described* [obj.] *as* [adj.] is replacing the *described* [obj.] *to be* [adj.] construction where the referent of the adv. *today* is much clearer. We still want to be able to express the time of that state of being, so we just modify the noun directly with the adverb. People do it naturally and are easily and correctly understood and so continue to do it, even though we all 'know' from school that adverb(ial)s should 'only' modify verbs, adjs., and other advs.