Oksana in Russia writes:
I've been teaching EFL for about 4 years, and the longer I teach it the more complicated it seems, the more lacunae in my knowledge I discover.
That’s exactly my experience...and I’ve been teaching English for 41 years! :-)
The problem I'm struggling with now, is whether there are any rules regulating the choice between
A + Numeral + Noun (a sixteen-week semester, a two-bedroom flat)
and
A+Numeral+Noun+ed (a one-layered disk, a three-headed monster)
constructions used as noun modifiers.
Is it the nature of the defined noun, the relations between the noun and the attribute or something else that tells us what construction to choose? And what would be the right way to say: a three-storey house or a three-storeyed house?
I try to explain to my students that it’s not a two flat and also a bedroom flat, but a two-bedroom flat: the two words take a hyphen to show that we should read them as a single adjective. The compounds can get even longer: day-to-day routine, six-and-a-half-year-old child, and so on.
We do have an exception: If part of the compound is an adverb ending in –ly, we don’t hyphenate: a truly sincere man, a really talented dancer.
As for your second question, someone else recently asked me about this and I realized something: When we use a part of a body as part of an adjective, we add –ed. For example:
a three-headed monster
a one-eyed man
a three-legged stool
a four-footed animal
a tight-fisted miser
But for other terms, we don’t use –ed. And we don't use a plural form of the noun in the compound adjective! For example:
a three-storey house (three-story house in North America!)
a one-layer disk (and a seven-layer cake)
a two-car garage
a six-and-a-half-year-old child
an eleven-man team
And here's another confusing problem: When "body" parts are also units of measurement, we don't add -ed. A six-foot man is a tall man; a six-footed man would be a monster. (If you live in a country that uses the metric system, this is just more proof that the English and North Americans are crazy.)
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