[Lucienne]

Thanks for your input. For clarification, this isn't something I'm trying to teach my students. I was asking because a teacher who is not a native speaker asked me, both for her own English development and because she teaches this kind of sentence.

I think Mesmark is onto something with the adjective/action distinction. After thinking some more, I came up with this "rule": the more the gerund seems to describe a quality or category rather than a temporary action, the more acceptable it is to put the gerund first. Dying man, moving train, and feuding family all describe a category or stable quality (a man isn't suddenly going to stop dying, and we can separate healthy men, sick men, and dying men), so they sound good. But "playing song" sounds bad because playing is a very temporary state, not a characteristic of the song at all.

In any case, I think Mesmark also makes a good point when he says that native speakers would in reality string more words together. "The standing man" and "the man standing" both sound a little funny by themselves, but "the man standing over there" is perfectly natural.

Anyway, thanks for the replies and let me know if you have any other ideas.