Re: Question about a grammatical term

I believe these are called substantive nouns.  Since English quite easily
allows one to use one part of speech as another ("Verbing weirds language"
-Calvin and Hobbes), I think that this is just an example of using a noun
as an adjective (in fact, I think "substantive" is an old term for
"adjective".).
It could be argued, I guess, that compound words are the same thing with
the space dropped.  That is, the first element is acting as an adective
for the second, a noun.
-M

P.S.  Maybe not.  Dictionary.com (American Heritage Dictionary
definition, I think) defines substantive as

 n. Grammar
A word or group of words functioning as a noun.

so, idunno.

Christophe wrote:

> En réponse à Harald Stoiber <hstoiber@...>:
>
> Another analysis of the examples which could be valid is to consider the first
> part of the compounds as an adjective, which qualifies thus the second noun.
> Since parts of speech in English have somewhat blurry frontiers, it could be
> valid. But the same blurriness makes this analysis also a bit useless :))) .
> The analysis of these forms as actual compounds which are just not written as
> one word stays better, as it allows a better comparison with other Germanic
> languages, which more often than not use actual compounds (and written as
> compounds) where English uses those constructions.
>
> So, finally, let's give a final answer to the question of Mr. I-am-nothing ;)) :
> What is the grammatical term referring to the construction in things
> like "water cooler" and "toilet humour"? Answer: compounding :)) .

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