Leo and Simon, (01)
As Leo pointed out, the phrase "attorney general" is actually
a noun-adjective phrase, using a grammatical pattern that is
based on French word order. (02)
Leo>
> In general, hyphenated or string-concatenated noun-noun compounds
> are clearer, but because they are lexicalized, they often have
> idiosyncratic meanings. Example: broomstick, egghead, night-rider. (03)
Actually, even those compounds follow the pattern that the last
noun is the head and the preceding noun modifies it: (04)
broomstick -- a stick of a broom (05)
egghead -- this is a combination of a metonym (using 'head' to
refer to a person with a focus on the head) and using the
word 'egg' as a deprecating modifier of the head of that person. (06)
night-rider -- a rider who rides at night (possibly with other
connections to the night). (07)
In any case, N-N patterns are among the most difficult syntactic
constructions to interpret for NLP systems, primarily because
they are so idiosyncratic. (08)
John (09)
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