Does hyphenation affect the meaning of these sentences?

CliveMale would include male children, while man can be taken as meaning only adult males.

We normally say eg 'a male engineer', but we don't normally say 'a man engineer'. Is this the kind of thing you are talking about?

I think English is often ambiguous, as perhaps all languages are. But sometimes the ambiguity involves saying things that a native speaker would seldom or never say.

Clive

The difference probably lies in how adjectives and nouns modify other nouns. Like in "tall driver", the adjective describes a quality of a noun, that is "the driver is tall". And in "track driver", the noun also describes a quality of "driver", but it is a different kind of quality, like "belonging to a category" or "of this kind". Though in some contexts "tall driver" could be interpreted as a driver of tall [people]. If one assumes that the noun is omitted. Say, "Jim has a very small car and he drives only short people. Andy is a tall driver." Like in "tall [people] driver". On the other hand, if "track" is a device that enables driving, then in "Jim is a track driver", the noun "track" would describe a quality of Jim, that is "what kind of driver". "A man engineer" could also be conceivable in certain contexts. Say, a genetic engineer who specializes on men genome would be a man engineer, that is an engineer of man. But then if we compare "Jim is a man-killer" and "Jim is a singer-songwriter", the first one starts to seem ambiguous too. Maybe it all depends only on a context? Or, as you said, if there is an ambiguity, a native speaker would infer the most probable meaning, the most frequently used?

There is a difference of how "man hater" is used in dictionaries and in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The former seem to give only the hyphenated form, while the latter - only unhyphenated. And I am wondering if there is more than just a preference to it?

Thanks for the help and the correction.