On Thu, 16 May 2002, MJ Ray wrote:
phil hunt philh@comuno.freeserve.co.uk wrote:
On Thursday 16 May 2002 12:46 am, MJ Ray wrote:
ITYM "image conversion" is the noun?
That phrase is a noun-expression. Both "image" and "conversion" are nouns.
But I think "image conversion" is a noun too, but a sort of compound noun. A noun expression can contain adjectives too, I thought. Is that right, or do I have to go digging through the linguistics books...?
It's a compound nominal, yes. That's perfectly valid in modern English, and there's a similar thing in German (where you concatenate the words). In French, the preference is strongly for X de Y, rather than Y X or YX.
You can analyse the English thing as "the first noun is acting as an adjective" or say that there's a rule "noun + noun -> noun" [*]. I think I'd say the latter, these days.
Mk
[*] or if I'm being nostalgic, "nbar + nbar -> nbar"