using noun as adjective; does position matter?
I'm doing some programming and I'm analyzing text written in English. I'm identifying parts of speech and I run into cases where I have something like vacuum cleaner. I, as a human, know that the word cleaner is dominant in this case and the word vacuum describes the cleaner. Both of these words are nouns though (I'm using the Corpus of Contemporary English which tells me the part of speech for 500,000 words).
My question is, if you have two nouns in a row like this, is the noun that acts as an adjective always on the left of the "dominant" noun? I can come up w/ cases that act like this, however not the reverse.
- laptop computer
- data collector
- steel screw
Any help is appreciated.
In English, the modifying noun is a premodifier, that is, it is placed before the main noun; if the order is reversed, say for reasons of clarification in a list, etc., the relationship is maintained with the use of a comma: cleaner, vacuum.
Your examples are called noun adjuncts where the definition includes the term premodifier.
Of your examples, one can be reversed (however unlikely), but the meaning is changed: steel screw can be reversed, to screw steel, but this would be understood as steel set apart to be made into screws.
Race car would become car race: a particular kind of race with cars, as opposed to bike race, foot race, etc.
Bike race can be reversed to become race bike.
So, yes, the modifier of two noun pairs precedes the head (or modified element). The only exception that I can think of is if the word is a foreign one.
There is an exception that leaps to mind, and that would be "Attorney General." Although I have seen people define such a person as the "attorney for the 'general public'," my understanding is that "General" here means leader or head, thus the noun form and not the adjectival form of "generic" or "nondescript." Dictionary.com seems to agree.
I have seen it noted elsewhere that that titles do not contain adjectives.
The fact that it is a reversed compound is witnessed by the fact that the plural is Attorneys General, indicating that "Attorney" is the 'dominant' noun, as you put it.