grammar - "Employee" in the phrase "employee ID" is a determiner, not an adjective—right?


I am a software developer with a bit of a linguistic slant. We were recently given some training on how to name database fields and were told to avoid adjectives in names.


Then we were given an example: “employee_id” is considered a bad name because of the adjective. I just about exploded. “Employee” is a noun, not an adjective. Which makes “employee” a determiner!


And then I thought about it some more and wanted to make sure I had the right definition of “determiner”, which is admittedly a fuzzy definition. “Employee” is essential to the meaning of “employee ID”. Then again, is this really “short” for “employee’s ID” (in which case the genitive noun is definitely a determiner)?


Is there a good definition of “determiner” out there? Is “employee” in this case a determiner? And why?



Answer



It's a noun modifier. See the Wikipedia article on grammatical modifiers for details. Whoever wrote the example saying that "employee" is an adjective in the noun phrase "employee ID" has been confused into thinking that any word that modifies a noun is an adjective.


It's not a determiner, though, either.


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