M_K wrote:Nope, I do not agree.
Those both are nouns in English, or make me change my mind?
Though you can translate one of these as adjectives in Russian...
OK, M_K
You're not completely wrong when you insist on the first word in "car repair" being a noun. It is a noun. But it's as an adjective from syntactical point of view.
English is not like Russian - it doesn't have cases, like nominative, genitive, accusative etc. So sentences in English have to follow a certain word order. I hope we agree on that. So even if you had some words you did not understand, you'd still be able to recognize what they are from their position in the phrase.
For example:
Peter eats cake.
You know the first word is a noun, the second is a verb and the third is also a noun. You also understand the phrase - a boy named Peter is consuming sweet pastry, cake.
But what about this one:
The slithy toves gyred in the wabe.
Do you know what this means? I don't think so. But if you do, tell me where you buy your "grass"
. Anyway, I took this example from Lewis Carrol's "Jabberwocky" and just changed it a little.
However, though you don't understand the words, you can still identify the category they belong to, and even more! You know "the" is a determinate article, you know "slithy" is an adjective, you know "toves" is a noun, plural; "gyred" is a verb in past tense, "in" is a preposition, "the" - another determinate article and "wabe" has to be a noun.
Also, you should be able to recognize the
parsing and the
hierarchy in the sentence. "The slithy toves" is a nominal phrase (NOM), because its head is a noun. It's also a subject. "Gyred" is a VERB". "In the wabe" is a prepositional phrase (PREP), because its head is the preposition "in". It's also an indirect object. You know that NOM and VERB are more important than PREP, because if you remove one of them, the sentence will not function.
You can ask questions and play with this sentence. You can say: The slithy toves are gyring in the wabe. All the slithy toves except for the slythiest gire in the wabe every day. Who is gyring? What are the toves doing? Where are they gyring?
So, there is a certain order of constituents. A native speaker of English will recognize this order automatically. Unfortunately, we, the ESL speakers have to learn it. And it doesn't just come down to the primitive scheme SVO - Subject Verb Object.
Take a NOMinal phase: what is first? It's the article. What is next? The adjective. What is next? The head, i.e. the noun. But what if we have a NOM that consists of several adjectives? What is the order then? What if we have a couple of numbers there, too?
If you say "that black old magic", you are not following the correct English order. "That old black magic" is the "right" way.
Here, I found the website that gives the order for a nominal phrase:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:3GXmpi4rqCAC:occawlonline.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/azar/chapter4/custom7/deluxe-content.html+%22noun+as+adjective%22+English&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 I'm sorry for the huge link, but it was only available in google's cache. Scroll down the page until you see "Order of adjectives". It's all there, just with a different terminology.
You see, when you have a noun before the head word, it acts as an adjective. It's still a noun, but it's role is not that of a head. It's a NOUN MODIFIER of the head, if you want. But it's still an ADJECTIVE in traditional grammar terms. It's an ADJECTIVE because of its
position in the phrase. It's an ADJECTIVE, because it gives the HEAD an intrinsic characterization.
Nouns and adjectives behave differently in English and Russian.
