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I'm in the process of writing documentation. I'm making use of attributive nouns to describe business-specific concepts and entities.

There's one entity in particular which I'm currently referring to as the "details page" (a page that displays a product's details). I'm trying to understand whether I'm using attributive nouns properly.

In contrast to a noun phrase such as "sports car", where the attributive noun "sports" adds ideas such as speed and power to create a new general concept (a high performance vehicle), in "details page" the word "details" is used to distinguish this particular page from all other pages. There's no general concept of a details page in my domain, it is only used to refer to the details page. It assigns identity to "page".

In this context, is "details" an attributive noun? Should it be capitalized? Somehow "details page" feels different to "sports car" but I can't quite put my finger on it.

aryzing
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    I don't see the difference. Just as you might distinguish a product description "details page" from a "user reviews page", you might have to decide whether to use your "sports car" or your "family saloon car" to drive to work. We don't normally capitalise a noun phrase just because it happens to include an "attributive noun" (or any other kind of word used adjectively, including ordinary adjectives such as the first* page, the red car*). – FumbleFingers Mar 10 '22 at 14:41
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    I'd recommend the terminology given at compounds and phrases ... compound nouns vs free combinations vs collocations. It is also stated there that accurate separation of strings of matrix nouns into such classes is often disputed. Nowadays, dictionaries help by listing open compounds. But the semantic connection between [N₁] and [N₂] in the string [N₁ N₂] can take very diverse forms. Plastic fork. Football manager. Summer flower. Bargain basement.... – Edwin Ashworth Mar 10 '22 at 19:19

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You are still using an attributive noun, that is, a noun modifying another noun rather like an adjective would (see Wikipedia, ThoughtCo).

Some attributive nouns form noun phrases recognized widely enough that, over time, users recognize them as a general concept. Dictionaries may even recognize them as their own lexeme, since the usage may be distinct from how one would parse the phrase literally:

Most noun phrases formed with attributive nouns don't undergo this extra development. One can generate many noun phrases using attributive nouns to fit specific situations. For page alone you could have:

  • details page
  • contacts page
  • information page
  • resource page
  • company page
  • product page

So the difference may be that you don't understand details page in as restrictive a way you understand sports car.

TaliesinMerlin
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