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It was a speech calculated to appeal to the unions.

I encountered this sentense on the internet and got a question that

how the sentence will change its meaning or nuance if the noun and adjective switch their position, being as:

It was a calculated speech to appeal to the unions.

Could you tell me how those two are different?

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1 Answer 1

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Both sentences refer to a speech that is intended to appeal to the unions, but they do it in different ways. In the first sentence the word 'calculated' is part of a longer adjective phrase describing the single noun 'speech'

calculated to appeal to the unions.

In the second sentence the single adjective 'calculated' describes the noun phrase

speech to appeal to the unions

If we these make these two ideas explicit to make them more clear you can see how different the sentences are:

It was a speech that was calculated to appeal to the unions.
It was a calculated speech that was made to appeal to the unions.

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