Re: word order of adjectives

Tommie L Powell wrote:
 > I notice that, in every language I'm familiar with (even if its grammar
 > doesn't ever require a sentence's words to follow any word-order rules),
 > any group of adjectives that modify a particular noun are ordinarily
 > arranged in a particular order.  For example, in English, we may speak of
 > a BIG OLD RED CAR (or house or whatever), but people do a double-take if
 > we say OLD BIG RED CAR or BIG RED OLD CAR or OLD RED BIG CAR or RED OLD
 > BIG CAR or RED BIG OLD CAR (or house or whatever).  So it seems that size
 > beats age and color, and that age beats color, somewhere in the brains of
 > English speakers.
 >
 > This also holds where only two adjectives are involved.  It's normally a
 > BIG OLD CAR (not an OLD BIG CAR), or an OLD RED CAR (not a RED OLD CAR),
 > or a BIG RED CAR (not a RED BIG CAR).
 >
 > Has anybody here considered this matter?  If so, what are your thoughts?
 > Thanks.
 >
 >

I'm afraid my thoughts on it aren't very profound: I've noticed it and
wondered about it, but on the whole I just hope someone will explain it
to me one day :)

It does seem reasonable to say, however, that it's not really the adjective
itself that determines its position in a sequence of adjectives, but
the semantic class it belongs to. AFAICT, 'red' in you examples can be
replaced by any colour-word, regardless of its origin or register (an
everyday word of Germanic origin like "white", or a somewhat technical
recent borrowing like "ochre", say)


Can anyone come up with a counterexample to the following model? If it's
inaccurate, it should be easy to find a counterexample, since it's a very
simple model:

There's a 'privileged class' of adjectives, all of which are very basic
items of vocabulary used for universal concepts. Examples include 'old' and
'big'. This might be something like the class of adjectives in French that
come before the noun, or the class of adjectives in Irish which take 'go'
when used predicatively.

'Privileged' adjectives come before colour adjectives. Other adjectives
come after both usually (as in 'the big red modern car'), but can be
fronted for emphasis ('the *modern* big red car')

How unreasonable is that?

s.
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