Friday, June 17, 2016

grammaticality - "a food-hygienically acceptable substance": Grammatical syntax?

In a document (written by a native Japanese speaker), I see the following phrase that sets off my acceptability and grammaticality alarms:





a food-hygienically acceptable substance




Google shows only 130 or so hits for:




food-hygienically acceptable





some of which are like for:




keep the food hygienically acceptable




Which is fine.



But the others are all translated from Japanese, which makes me suspicious.




So my questions to other native speakers are:




  1. Is the syntax of "a food-hygienically acceptable substance" grammatical? I can’t seem to extrapolate to other such A+NOUN+HYPHEN+LY ADVERB+NOUN phrases to test it.


  2. Is there any more natural way to express this, such as:




Left-side modification:





a food-hygiene-acceptable substance




More grammatical, but still awkward.



Right-side modification:




a substance acceptable in terms of food hygiene



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