I am currently writing a paper on British newspaper articles; however, I keep on encountering constructions such as:
"Student Jacob was in Italy" or
"jailed Samantha said yesterday…"
where words that my books say are nouns seem to be being used as adjectives? I would be grateful if someone could tell me if these nouns, in these instances, become adjectives?
Best Answer
To answer your question simply: an attributive noun is still a noun, it does not become an adjective.
As several commenters have noted, student is being used as an attributive noun, and jailed is being used as an attributive adjective. This doesn't change their classification. Let's take them one at a time.
First, we have "Student Jacob..." with student as an attributive noun. Student is still a description of a (type of) person, even though it is adding itself as an attribute to the proper noun of Jacob. Take it alone, without the proper noun, and we still have a proper sentence: "A student was in Italy."
Next, we have "Jailed Samantha..." with jailed as an attributive adjective. The phrase of Jailed Samantha may be part of a noun phrase, but the word jailed is still an adjective.
As brought up by the commenters, there is another related type of adjective called a Nominalized Adjective which can be used in place of a noun. Take the following sentence:
Both jailed and freed are adjectives describing protesters. The first one, jailed, is an attributive adjective and is part of the noun phrase Jailed protesters. Freed is a nominalized adjective which also describes the protesters, but is being used in place of a noun.
Most importantly, however, if the words protesters and the were removed from the example sentence, it would no longer make sense. Attributive adjectives and nominalized adjectives still have to define or qualify nouns, even if the definition or qualification is implied.