Re: word order of adjectives

--- Tommie L Powell <tommiepowell@...>
wrote:
> 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).
"BIG OLD" is almost a kind of compound adjective,
/'bIgol/, and almost nèver means "literally large
and antiquated". It's more of an emphatic
modifier, an irreducible unit that is not
utterable as "OLD BIG".

My eight farthings.

Padraic.


=====
la cieurgeourea provoer mal trasfu ast meiyoer ke la cieurgeourea andrext ben trasfu.

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