Meeting room, Kitchen table, car door, swimming pool

Question

HiA lot of people (even books) call the underlined words adjectives. I am aware that they are not adjectives. But can we simply call them adjectival nouns?Meeting roomKitchen tableTooth brushSwimming poolThanks,Tom

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Mr. Tom
Hi
But can we simply call them adjectival nouns?
Meeting room
Kitchen table
Tooth brush
Swimming pool
There are different labels given to these words.
Noun adjunct, attributive noun, compound noun or premodifier.

CalifJim · Answer

Mr. Tom can we simply call them adjectival nouns?

You can call them anything you want except late for dinner.

But don't expect everyone to agree with you. However conveniently descriptive 'adjectival noun' may be, I don't think many grammarians use that terminology.

For me, 'meeting' and 'swimming' are verb forms, the meanings being 'room for meeting (in)' and 'pool for swimming (in)'. Viewing 'meeting' and 'swimming' as particular activities, you might say they are noun-like.

The other two ('kitchen' and 'tooth') are clearly nouns. The argument that they are not adjectives goes thus: There are no words 'kitchener', 'kitchenest', 'toother', or 'toothest'. That is, those words cannot be inflected as adjectives are (tall, taller, tallest).

In any case, all four of those words are modifiers. They modify the noun which follows. Such modifiers of nouns are not generally called adjuncts.

So with 'kitchen table', you have a noun which modifies and a noun which is the head of the noun phrase. In older texts this is called a compound noun, of which English contains hundreds.

With 'tooth brush', you have the same set-up, but this brings with it the special problem that it's usually one word 'toothbrush', which is simply a noun. It's a question up whether you want to bother analyzing 'tooth brush' when few even use it, preferring 'toothbrush'.

CJ

Meeting room, Kitchen table, car door, swimming pool

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