A colleague of mine wrote the following sentence:
I have worked on the below mentioned issues:
Now, I'm not a native speaker, and certainly not an authority on grammar. I construct sentences based on what I can only describe as intuition (what sounds right based on what I've previously read/ heard.)
I told him below mentioned issues
didn't sound right and I thought it should be issues mentioned below
instead.
His counter:
- He was reluctant to end with a prespostion.
- If
above mentioned
is valid,below mentioned
should be, too.
I don't subscribe to the notion that prepositions can't end a sentence. But I didn't wan't a debate about that. I replied:
- The phrase which the preposition governs goes without saying (as in, mentioned below/above this sentence)
above mentioned
isn't really two words. It's a one-word adjective.
He was satisfied, but he insisted he had seen it being written as two words.
Later, out of curiosity, I did an ngram search, which shows that above mentioned
as two separate words is indeed frequent. More so than above-mentioned
until 1935, and still in 2nd place, outranking abovementioned
. I assumed people using it as an adjective were more likely to drop the hyphen than use two words. Apparently I was wrong.
I suppose the frequency of above mentioned
could be padded by sentences like this:
The people (who live) above mentioned seeing him.
But the same should be true for below mentioned
, which is virtually non-existent according to the ngram
Hence my question:
Is above mentioned issues
grammatical? Is below mentioned issues
? What are the rules behind this?