A subordinate clause is said to be attributive if its function in the complex sentence is analogous to that of an attribute in a simple sentence. It differs from an attribute in so far as it characterises the thing denoted by its head word through some other action or situation in which that thing is involved. This could not, in many cases at least, be achieved within the limits of a simple sentence.
The noun is the main nominative part of speech, having the categorial meaning of “substance” and “thingness”.
The noun is characterized by a set of formal features. It has its word-building distinctions, including typical suffixes, compound stem models, conversion patterns.
It has the grammatical categories of gender, number, case, article determination.
The most characteristic function of the noun is that of the subject in the sentence. The function of the object in the sentence is also typical of the noun. Other syntactic functions, i.e. attribute, adverbial and even predicative are not immediately characteristic of its substantive quality.
The noun is characterized by some special types of combinability. It is the prepositional combinability with another noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb.
The casual combinability characterizes the noun alongside of its prepositional combinability with another noun.
English nouns can also easily combine with one another by sheer contact. In the contact group the noun in pre-position plays the role of a semantic qualifier to the noun in post-position. E.g. film festivals, a cannon ball.
The lexico-grammatical status of such combinations has been a big problem for many scholars, who were uncertain as to how to treat this combination: either as one separate compound word or a word-group.
