Back-To-Back Nouns

Question

I have a question about a special case of English noun usage. In English, it is proper and commonplace in both formal and informal English to use nouns back to back, as though those preceding nouns were adjectives.

Example:

The Los Angeles bus transportation system is dysfunctional.

The ball boy ran across the court.

What grammatical rule in English permits this syntax? Again, the nouns almost act as adjectives…but don’t at the same time. I have no idea what this could be called and have found no name for it online.

Answer 1

Back-to-back nouns occur for different reasons. These include:

(1) Nouns that are open compounds, such as shoe tree, gentleman caller, monkey wrench, snow day, pipe dream, and acid drop. These can be found in dictionaries and have fixed meanings that are not always readily deduced from the meanings of the constituent nouns.

(2) Nouns used attributively before another noun, where they function as modifiers, such as a stone lion, lion costume, strawberry jam, and printer glitch. You still need to figure out the connection: a lion made of stone, a costume that looks like a lion, jam made from strawberries, and a glitch involving the printer.

Noun-noun chains can build up. "I'm printing the strawberry jam labels now." Here "strawberry jam" is being used attributively as if it were a one-word modifier. In the right circumstances, we could easily understand "I left the pen on the strawberry jam label carton."

(3) Newspapers often take liberties by piling up attributive-type noun clusters to save space in headlines: "Consumer Loan Bill Vote Delayed" or even "Consumer Loan Bill Vote Delay" Here the noun chain does form a unit of meaning (sometimes an entire sentence), but these can present readers with a parsing puzzle that requires unfolding the noun chain, supplying the missing words, and reconstructing the intended syntax: "There has been a Delay in the Vote on the Bill concerning Consumer Loans.

(4) Noun-nouns occurring because they just happen to be adjacent for reasons of syntax. They do not form a single two-word unit of meaning:

"He was the type of student colleges would be thrilled to have." ("He was the type of student [that] colleges would be thrilled to have.")

"In the summer boys turn to sports." (Here "summer" ends an adverbial phrase.)

"Don't take to heart names he calls you when he's drunk." ("Take to heart" being an idiom for "feel hurt by" or "take seriously")

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(Many years ago, living in Italy, I had to translate the name of a kitchen appliance that I was not familiar with--a new (for me at least) kitchen appliance, a centrifuga scolaverdure (literally a "centrifuge [for] draining vegetables"). I was fairly certain that the English name for something in a kitchen wouldn't involve the word centrifuge, but I nonetheless had to smile when I learned we call it a salad spinner.)

Answer 2

Merriam-Webster has an article entitled "Nouns that Look Like Adjectives", which says:

They're called "attributive nouns." Attributive here means "joined directly to a noun in order to describe it." -MW

This is not a 'rule of grammar' except in the trivial sense that when two nouns are side by side, one can modify the other or the combination can mean something different from each of the nouns individually.

There is a strong overlap between the function of nouns and adjectives. Both describe things, and sometimes it is useful to make a stronger association between nouns than using similes or metaphors. For example, a shrub that has been shaped to look like an elephant might be called an 'elephant bush' instead of an 'elephant-like bush'.