Noun adjunct

Related concepts

The adjectival noun term was formerly synonymous with noun adjunct but now usually means nominalized adjective (i.e., an adjective used as a noun) as a term that contrasts the noun adjunct process, e.g. the Irish meaning "Irish people" or the poor meaning "poor people." Japanese adjectival nouns are a different concept.

English

Singular vs plural

Noun adjuncts were traditionally mostly singular (e.g. "trouser press") except when there were lexical restrictions (e.g. "arms race"), but there is a recent trend towards more use of plural ones (e.g. "sales department," "jobs program," "systems analyst"). Many of these can also be or were originally interpreted and spelled as plural possessives (e.g. "chemicals' agency," "writers' conference," "Rangers' hockey game"), but they are now often written without the apostrophe, although decisions on when to do so require editorial judgment. When plural requires possessive There are morphological restrictions on the classes of adjunct that can be plural and nonpossessive; irregular plurals are solecistic as nonpossessive adjuncts (for example, "men clothing" or "women magazine" sounds improper to fluent speakers).

Fowler's Modern English Usage states in the section "Possessive Puzzles":

Recursive use

Noun adjuncts can also be strung together in a longer sequence preceding the final noun, with each added noun modifying the noun which follows it, in effect creating a multiple-word noun adjunct which modifies the following noun (e.g. "chicken soup bowl", in which "chicken" modifies "soup" and "chicken soup" modifies "bowl"). There is no theoretical limit to the number of noun adjuncts which can be added before a noun, and very long constructions are occasionally seen, for example "Dawlish pub car park cliff plunge man rescued", in which "pub", "car park", "cliff", and "plunge" are all noun adjuncts. They could each be removed successively (starting at the beginning of the sentence) without changing the grammar of the sentence. This type of construction is not uncommon in headlinese, the condensed grammar used in newspaper headlines.

Use when an adjectivally inflected alternative is available

In contexts where they are used frequently, noun phrases can become lexical bundles that effectively serve as single semantic units. One consequence of this bundling can be an otherwise unconventional location for prepositions. For example, in contexts where the phrase "regulatory impact analysis" is readily understood, a sequence like "regulatory impact analysis of the law on business" would not pose difficulty. Readers unfamiliar with the core phrase "regulatory impact analysis" may find "analysis of the regulatory impact of the law on business" or "regulatory impact analysis of the law's effects on business" easier to parse.

Postpositive noun adjuncts

The English language is restrictive in its use of postpositive position for adjectival units (words or phrases), making English use of postpositive adjectives—although not rare—much less common than use of attributive/prepositive position. This restrictive tendency is even stronger regarding noun adjuncts; examples of postpositive noun adjuncts are rare in English, except in certain established uses such as names of lakes or operations, for example Lake Ontario and Operation Desert Storm. Relatedly, in English when an institution is named in honor of a person, the person's name is idiomatically in prepositive position (for example, the NICHD is the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development), whereas various other languages tend to put it in postpositive position (sometimes in quotation marks); their pattern would translate overliterally as National Institute of Child Health and Human Development "Eunice Kennedy Shriver".

References

pt:Termos acessórios da oração#Adjunto adnominal

References

1. "Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and hundreds more". bartleby.com.
2. "Possessives and Attributives". chicagomanualofstyle.org.
3. "Compound Words". commnet.edu.
4. (2 February 2014). "Dawlish pub car park cliff plunge man rescued". bbc.co.uk.