Noun adjuncts in English and their rendition in Greek

It is amazing how long you may have been teaching and yet not fully identified the difficulties your students may come up against. There was a time when linguists invested far more time in comparing English to other languages and looking into systematic differences that inhibited understanding.

It is my feeling that there are quite a few aspects of the English language posing problems for speakers not just of one first language but of several which remain largely unexplored. At least I gather this much from discussions with other teachers, many of whom overlook these areas of difficulty in their teaching, and the same goes for the majority of course books whether they are meant for an international market or for speakers of a specific language.

 I will focus on one such aspect in this post without any pretensions to thoroughness; this would entail large-scale research with the participation of keen teachers and collection of corpora. However, I will attempt a certain methodology for this suggested research.

My topic is noun adjuncts, which means nouns qualifying nouns. Some simple examples would be:

orange juice, coffee pot, wine glass, health authorities, drug addiction, guard rail

 and many others. The above-mentioned examples are simple in the sense that there is only one noun qualifying another. However, there could be more:

landmark compensation case, snail shell spiral

or the attributive noun could be qualified by an adjective:

social media star, post-traumatic stress disorder

Being a native speaker of Greek, I will put forward my theory of rendition of phrases made up of two nouns to begin with. To my mind there are three different ways in which these phrases can be rendered in Greek:

·       second noun – first noun in genitive case (Most may in fact fall under this category.)

orange juice, wine glass

·       first noun translated as adjective – second as noun

health authorities, giant meteorite

·       second noun preposition (mostly “for”) second noun

drug addiction, air supremacy, kitchen towel, safety net