What analysis to give to quotative noun modifiers

[manning]

There are pre-nominal modifiers that are either explicitly or implicitly quotative, such as 'four seasons in a day' here:

The Irish weather works on the ‘four seasons in a day’ principle, which basic­ally means that you can’t predict a thing when it comes to the behaviour of the sky. Some basic assumptions, however, can be made.

At present we seem to analyze them with appos. I'm not convinced that that is such a good analysis....

[amir-zeldes]

Isn't this basically a nominal compound where the modifier has an internal phrase structure? I think the modifier can be anything, and the ordering preferences might also suggest that it is occupying a compound modifier position, rather than amod. But I might be influenced by German here:

A do-it-yourself attitude
A delightful do-it-yourself attitude
A do-it-yourself freelancer attitude
A freelancer do-it-yourself attitude
? A do-it-yourself delightful attitude
?? A do-it-yourself freelancer delightful attitude

The ordering above it meant to suggest 'adjectives before compound modifiers', but I realize this is murkier in English than in languages like German or Hebrew, where compounding and adjectives are more clearly delimited.

[nschneid]

I would say

A do-it-yourself freelancer attitude

sounds better than

A freelancer do-it-yourself attitude

though I don't claim to understand the rationale behind English adjective ordering! (And it's possible these NPs could have different interpretations under different orderings.)

[amir-zeldes]

Freelancer is also a nominal, so their relative ordering doesn't affect the argument above. The idea is just to show that 'do-it-yourself' is better as an nn compound modifier than as amod, which might be supported if such phrases prefer to be closer to the head than adjectives like 'delightful' (assuming compounding happens before adjectival modification).

I'm pretty sure there will be empirical counter-examples, but if the tendency holds it might be quantitative evidence to prefer that over nmod. I would vote against appos here either way ( ‘four seasons in a day’ principle is right headed, semantically a type of principle, not a type of four seasons, and morphologically has singular agreement)