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Dear Leo,

I have one absolutely delightful student who I know will want to understand a rule if I can give her one. This student has a tendency to make compound nouns when they can’t be but should be part of a prepositional phrase. See examples below. It’s something I’ve encountered with Arabic-speaking students before, but medical writing seems to bring it out even more because I’ve noticed it more frequently this semester.

"nerve destruction" instead of "destruction of the nerves"
"coronary heart disease symptoms" instead of "symptoms of coronary heart disease"

Angela Waigand
University of Calgary, Qatar

Dear Angela,

Your grammar question is an interesting and complex one for which there is no simple answer.

Traditional Grammatical Explanation
As with many grammatical rules, this one is general and will not hold up to close scrutiny for many examples. In fact, it is one of the grayer areas of grammar and the best answer is that there are very broad guidelines, rather than anything resembling a hard and fast rule.

The first thing we should do is to draw the distinction between the possessive—apostrophe s (’s) or of—as in the book’s chapters or the chapters of the book, and the compound noun (e.g., book chapter). Although all of them indicate relationships between two nouns, the former two indicate a possession or relationship, while the latter is more descriptive, often similar to an adjective. Thus a dog’s bone or the bone of the dog  indicates that the bone belongs to the dog. A dog bone generally indicates a description of the bone.

Much of the time, only one of the options for possessives works with two nouns, either ’s or of. One general rule is that for animate objects (people, animals, etc.) we use the ’s possessive. Thus we would generally choose “dog’s bone” and not “bone of the dog.” “Dog bone” would be expected to have a different meaning. An additional complicating factor is that we seem to use possessives to describe a specific instance, and compound nouns to describe general ideas (cat’s food vs. the cat food). The ’s structure is common when the first noun is a person and the second noun is used or produced by the person, as in chef’s special, mother’s love, children’s clothing, etc.

Compound nouns can often be switched to adjective clauses with the second noun as the subject and the first noun as the object: e.g., flower shop (shop that sells flowers), sausage factory (factory that makes sausages), pencil jar (jar that holds pencils).

Noun–noun structures in which the first noun uses ’s often follow the reverse, where the first noun would be the subject and the second noun would be the object: e.g. John’s friend (John has a friend), king’s speech (king gave a speech), Shepherd’s delight (the shepherd enjoys the delight), etc.

Compound nouns are generally used when classifying, such as with “water bottle” (one kind of bottle), and “motorcycle helmet” (one kind of helmet).

We can also see that the noun + noun structure also seems to be more common when referring to common classes of the second noun (e.g., history book, biology book, cook book), but not when it is not a common class (e.g., a book about the moon, a book about Qatar). The fact that we “know” which classes of book are common and which are not indicates the complexity of this pattern.

Teaching Tips
One major advantage of teaching grammar to language learners is that it is highly generative, meaning that when students know one grammatical structure, they can replace constituent parts to create other meaningful phrases. This issue may not be the best structure to teach, and certainly not at lower levels. We can talk about the general patterns outlined above, but English is replete with exceptions. Learning noun-noun joiners is very similar to vocabulary, in that each word/phrase may be best learned as it comes.

Students dealing with the question of what combinations are most appropriate may benefit from understanding collocations and having access to a good collocations dictionary or understanding how to use online concordancers.

Language Notes
English is a Germanic language, and the ’s for possessives is derived from Old English. However, English is also heavily influenced by Romance languages, especially French. This is why we also use the “of the” for possessives (note that the position of the noun switches “dog’s bone” and “bone of the dog”). English has retained both options, complicating the possessive construction.  The noun-noun construction is a typical Germanic pattern.

Last Month’s Brain Teaser
Look at these three samples of student writing. What error do all three sentences have in common? How would you address this in a teaching class?

“I am excited for the next lecture.”
“The class read it individually and started discussing about it.”
“The “Hierarchy System” originated from 4th century China.”

The first correct response:

I believe the “error” in all three samples is intended to refer to the prepositions following the verb. In #1, I would accept this sentence as correct. It sounds slightly odd to my ear, but it actually is a common construction, and from a descriptive standpoint, “excited for” is commonly used to express excitement for something (noun) in the future. (A search on the COCA corpus reveals that this is not just intuition: “We’re excited for the upcoming spring.” “I’m excited for this segment... ” “I’m rather excited for tonight.”)

Certain prepositions work with verbs to have specific meaning.

In #1, “excited for” can refer to excitement toward a future something (a noun or a noun clause). For example, following it with a noun, you could say, “I’m excited for the future” (noun follows) or “I’m excited for my cousin to arrive” (noun clause follows). It is worth mentioning that if the noun following is a person, it usually changes the meaning to present (e.g., “I’m so excited for you.”). The more common preposition to follow “excited” is “about.” “Excited about” is followed only by a noun, and not a noun clause, but it has no restrictions on whether you can use it to describe excitement about something present or something future, for example, “excited about this opportunity.”

In #2, no preposition is needed because “discuss” means “talk about.” If you replace “talk about” with “discuss,” you don’t need the “about.” For example, the following two sentences have roughly the same meaning: “Let’s talk about it” and “Let’s discuss it.”

In #3, the verb “originate” has a subtle meaning that what follows will be a starting place or block of time, not a point in time. “Originate in” is more common because you can start “in” a space, not a point. For example, something can originate in a state, originate in a city, originate in a country, or in this case, originate in 4th century China. “From” is usually used with a point of time that is continued from, such as “From the first grade on, ...”

Dr. Kara Reed
Tucson, AZ
University of Arizona

Thank you for your detailed response, Kara. As you point out, the issue in all three sentences is the preposition. As you also note, prepositions are not as clear-cut as we would like to think. There is considerable variety in their usage, even by native speakers.

For those of us who teach students who need formal mainstream English, we need not only to alert students that they will hear other variants, but also help them master the “preferred” preposition. With very few rules for prepositions, teaching them as vocabulary, including teaching them together with the nouns/verbs/adjectives with which they collocate, is the hard but sure way to get there. 

This Month’s Brain Teaser
What is the problem with the common phrase seen at supermarket checkout aisles “Ten items or less” and how would you explain it to students?

The first correct answer will be published in the next column of Grammatically Speaking.
Please e-mail your responses to GrammaticallySpeaking@tesol.org.

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Examples cited in this column are authentic examples of language use and are not the
author’s creations.

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