Is "banker friend" a noun adjunct, or something else?

Question

Consider the sentence:

I have a banker friend, and she says that interest rates are going up.

Here a banker friend is being used to mean a friend who is a banker. Is there a name for this kind of construction?

It is similar to a noun adjunct, but it seems to me the examples there don't seem to fit this case exactly. In those, the pair (or sequence) of nouns stands in for a prepositional phrase, but in a friend who is a banker there is no preposition. The notion of a noun adjunct would seem to apply better to a sentence like

The new finance minister is well known as a banker friend.

Here banker friend stands for the prepositional phrase a friend of bankers. That seems quite different from my first example.

Answer 1

Your link says it all (cf also Apposition/ Wikipedia); You are right in your first example and wrong in your second.

If the person mentioned is primarily a friend, you are correct in saying

I have a banker friend, and she says that interest rates are going up.

If the person is primarily a banker, say

I have a friendly banker, and she says that interest rates are going up.

If you want to say that the Minister is friendly towards bankers, say

The new finance minister is well known as a bankers' friend.

Answer 2

Banker friend would still be a noun adjunct, because, as the link shows, noun adjuncts merely require that the modifier be optional and a noun.

So, noun adjuncts do not require a replacement prepositional phrase.