grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

, a noun adjunct, attributive noun, qualifying noun, noun (pre)modifier, or apposite noun is an optional

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

that modifies another noun; functioning similarly to an

adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...

, it is, more specifically, a noun functioning as a pre-modifier in a

noun phrase A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently ...

. For example, in the phrase "chicken soup" the noun adjunct "chicken" modifies the noun "soup". It is irrelevant whether the resulting compound noun is spelled in one or two parts. "Field" is a noun adjunct in both "field player" and " fieldhouse".

Related concepts

The ''adjectival noun'' term was formerly synonymous with noun adjunct but now usually means

nominalized adjective A nominalized adjective is an adjective that has undergone nominalization, and is thus used as a noun. In ''the rich and the poor'', the adjectives ''rich'' and ''poor'' function as nouns denoting people who are rich and poor respectively. In Eng ...

(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

possessive A possessive or ktetic form (Glossing abbreviation, abbreviated or ; from ; ) is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession (linguistics), possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a numbe ...

s (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. There are morphologic 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 headline is the text indicating the content or nature of the article below it, typically by providing a form of brief summary of its contents. The large type ''front page headline'' did not come into use until the late 19th century when incre ...

, the condensed grammar used in newspaper

headline The headline is the text indicating the content or nature of the article below it, typically by providing a form of brief summary of its contents. The large type ''front page headline'' did not come into use until the late 19th century when incre ...

Use when an adjectivally inflected alternative is available

It is a trait of

natural language A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...

that there is often more than one way to say something. Any logically valid option will usually find some currency in natural usage. Thus "erythrocyte maturation" and "erythrocytic maturation" can both be heard, the first using a noun adjunct and the second using an adjectival

inflection In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...

. In some cases one of the equivalent forms has greater idiomaticity; thus "

cell cycle The cell cycle, or cell-division cycle, is the sequential series of events that take place in a cell (biology), cell that causes it to divide into two daughter cells. These events include the growth of the cell, duplication of its DNA (DNA re ...

" is more commonly used than "cellular cycle". In some cases, each form tends to adhere to a certain

sense A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the surroundings through the detection of Stimulus (physiology), stimuli. Although, in some cultures, five human senses were traditio ...

; thus " face mask" is the normal term in hockey, and " facial mask" is heard more often in spa treatments. Although "spine cord" is not an idiomatic alternative to "spinal cord", in other cases, the options are arbitrarily interchangeable with negligible idiomatic difference; thus "spine injury" and "spinal injury" coexist and are equivalent from any practical viewpoint, as are " meniscus transplant" and "meniscal transplant". A special case in medical usage is "visual examination" versus " vision examination": the first typically means "an examination made visually", whereas the latter means "an examination of the patient's vision".

Using prepositions after such phrases

"Regulatory impact analysis of the law on business" is probably illogical or at least incomprehensible to all who are not familiar with the term "regulatory impact analysis". Such people understand the preposition "on" as belonging to the expression "law on business" (to which it grammatically belongs) or parse it as an incorrect preposition with "analysis" and do not recognize it as a feeble and grammatically incorrect attempt to refer back to the word "impact". Since the phrase "regulatory impact analysis" is standard in usage, changing it to "analysis of (the) regulatory impact" would look strange to experts even though putting the preposition "on" after it would not cause any problems: "analysis of the regulatory impact of the law on business". A possible solution that does not annoy experts or confuse non-experts is "regulatory impact analysis of the law's effects on business".

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 adjective A postpositive adjective or postnominal adjective is an adjective that is placed after the noun or pronoun that it modifies, as in noun phrases such as ''attorney general'', ''queen regnant'', or ''all matters financial''. This contrasts with prepo ...

s—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 Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is bounded on the north, west, and southwest by the Canadian province of Ontario, and on the south and east by the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. The Canada–United Sta ...

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

{{lexical categories, state=collapsed adjunct pt:Termos acessórios da oração#Adjunto adnominal