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Originally Posted by JTR
^^^^^
Prove me wrong if you can, i'm not saying im 100% sure, but i'm pretty sure. Otherwise if u can show me im wrong ill stand corrected.
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man eating shark can't mean the same as man-eating shark
without the use of a hyphen, in order to have the same meaning you would have to rearrange the sentence, ie. the shark was man eating
the hyphen establishes the subject of the clause as the noun "shark" and the adjective as the compound "man-eating", whereas in the absence of a hyphen there is no longer an adjective and the clause reverts back to the standard "noun-verb" structure
therefore:
man-eating shark: man-eating = adjective, shark = subject
man eating shark: man = subject, eating = verb, shark = direct objective of the verb "eating"