My native-speaker's grammatical intuition tells me that:
- There is a sleeping man under the tree.
is fine but
- There is a fishing man by the river bank.
is wrong. Why?
Both
- There is a man sleeping under the tree.
and
- There is a man fishing by the river bank.
are fine.
I've thought about this a little, and I've come up with some grammatical hypotheses, but I'd be very grateful if somebody could point me to a general reference on this matter.
Addendum:
Someone asked me what hypotheses I've come up with.
I've identified two cases where an -ing modifier can come before a noun:
-
When the -ing acts to modify the noun (like an adjective), rather than describe an action being performed at that time, it goes before the verb. E.g. flying fish, dancing girl.
-
When the verb suggests a sensory impression. E.g. crying baby, shining light.
But there must be at least one more class to account for expressions like a sleeping man.
Second addendum:
I should clarify precisely what fishing man is supposed to mean. It does not mean a man who fishes. That would be taken care of by case 1 of the hypothesis above. The intended meaning is a man who is fishing. (Just like a sleeping man is supposed to mean a man who is sleeping rather than a man who sleeps.)
Best Answer
In normal English syntax, single-word modifiers precede the noun they modify, but phrases follow the noun.
So you put the -ing word before the noun it modifies when it is acting as an adjective, not as a non-finite verb. You put the -ing word after the noun when it is part of a verbal phrase with other parts in it; you can’t have a long verbal phrase preceding the noun it modifies.
Sometimes the -ing word is actually a noun: a writing desk is a desk for writing, not a desk that happens to be writing. But it is still modifying desk. Here are examples of the -ing word used as a modifier (either as adjective or a noun) preceding the modified noun:
On the other hand, here are pairs of examples where the first one has the -ing word first where it acts as a simple adjectival modifer, and where the second one has it acting as an actual verb:
And so on and so forth. In your case, you could have put sleeping afterwards, and had a man sleeping under the tree, but sleeping men like sleeping dogs are not particularly unusual.
However, you would not normally speak of fishing men, so you would have a man (who was/is) fishing for something down by the river bank. If you strained it, you could build up a context in which fishing men might contrast with farming men or some such, but it would be abnormal.
You might find a man singing in the rain, or you might find a singing man (who is out) in the rain, but you will never find a singing-in-the-rain man. Or to put it more crudely, there is a world of difference between having a fucking idiot in your livingroom and having an idiot fucking in your livingroom.