Why "sheet provided" and not "provided sheet"?

[serena69]

Hi all!

I've just finished an exercise about alternative positions of present and past participle adjectives.

In English many participle adjectives can be used before or after nouns:
I counted the number of people waiting.
I counted the number of waiting people.

But some of these are rarely used before the noun:
None of my candidates applying was accepted. (but not ...the applying candidates...).

Is there a rule for it?

Thanks in advance.

[emsr2d2]

Hi all!

I've just finished an exercise about alternative positions of present and past participle adjectives.

In English many participle adjectives can be used before or after nouns:
I counted the number of people waiting.
I counted the number of waiting people.

But some of these are rarely used before the noun:
None of my candidates applying was accepted. (but not ...the applying candidates...).

Is there a rule for it?

Thanks in advance.

In both cases you quoted, there are unrequired missing words which make the word order necessary.

I counted the number of people [who were] waiting.
None of my candidates [who were] applying was accepted.

"Waiting" and "applying" are still verbs in those sentences, not adjectives so would not be put before the noun.

Note that there are some phrases where verb+ing goes before the noun (ie "the walking wounded") but they're normally recognised phrases of a couple of words together.

[BobK]

...
"Waiting" and "applying" are still verbs in those sentences, not adjectives so would not be put before the noun.

...

In fact, if you said you had seen 'waiting people' many people would assume you were talking about staff whose job it is to wait (in other words 'waiters and waitresses' aka wait-staff, wait-persons, and in some company 'waitrons').

b

[Rover_KE]

Serena, have you a question about your thread title?

Rover