It goes into some other theories on AOR (Adjective Ordering Restrictions) and I'd recommend it if you find the subject interesting. A quote from the top answer, which I enjoyed:
"I am reminded of how J.R.R. Tolkien’s mother once famously corrected him at a very early age when he said ‘a green great dragon’. She told him that it had to be ‘a great green dragon’, but when he asked her why, she couldn’t answer, thereby starting him down the road of puzzling over matters linguistic and philologic his whole life long."
I always assumed the ordering was based not on rules, but on the context of the subject in order to determine descriptive relevance.
For example, in "a great green dragon", the fact that the dragon is 'great' is significantly more important than the fact that it is 'green'. If you had a small red dragon and a great green dragon, it'll be easier to pick out the quality of 'great' [meaning large] before the color. And with "a scaly fire-breathing dragon", even though the fire-breathing part is more relevant in terms of danger, the scaly part is more descriptive; the dragon is scaly more often than it is fire-breathing, and it provides clearer imagery of what the dragon is like.
Of course, this has nothing to do with combinations of adjectives that become a different subject when strung together. "red Spanish leather" is talking about spanish leather that is red, whereas "Spanish red leather" could be describing a color called 'Spanish red', or a specific offshoot of Spanish leather that is more than simply a Spanish leather dyed red.
Doesn't "a great green dragon" have a different meaning than "a great green dragon" though? The former implies "green dragon" is the name/species of dragon, which happens to be big/great. Whereas the latter just means a big/great dragon, which is green.
No. There's a breed of dog called a Great Dane (which is actually German), so it would be appropriate to say 'a black Great Dane.' Obviously if you had a fantasy novel with dragons where they were classified by color or there were Greater and Lesser Dragon breeds, you could set your own rules of usage, but in the abstract dragons have to be treated like any other noun.
It seems to me that you agree with Swizec. 'Great Dragon' sounds just like 'Great Dane' when you put other adjectives. Certainly to my mind it sounds like it's a particular species of dragon. Given that the only place green-coloured dragons live is in fantasy (the komodo isn't green), there's pretty free reign to interpret it.
And in the context of animals, it's particularly unusual to use the adjective 'great' by itself, without it being part of the breed name. 'Great big' maybe, but rarely just 'great'. If you saw a large bulldog, it would sound strange to call it a 'great bulldog' instead of a 'great big bulldog' or other adjective.
This being said, because of their most prominent colour, we can talk about "gray great white sharks", and get the colour in on both sides :)
You're quite correct - I realised about five minutes after posting that what I wrote is really about when you want to use 'great' to mean 'larger in size'.
If someone says "I have a great bulldog", it generally means a bulldog that's excellent in some way. If someone says "I have a great brown bulldog", it's more likely that they're now using 'great' to talk about size.
Yes. Mathematically, it looks more like this:
(great (green dragon)). Or to add to the list of adjectives:
(roaring (great (green dragon)))
using BNF, you might say something like
[noun] := [adjective] [noun]
But this is not what the original post is getting at. For some reason, if you want to describe a house as being big and red, you must(1) use "big red house", and not "red big house".
1) Whereby "must" I actually mean in the vast majority of cases. There are always twisted counter examples, like:
"Aaron: Wow, look at all of those big houses - aren't they so much prettier than the little houses!
Betty: Well, mostly, but if you look at the red big house, it's actually much uglier than even the little houses"
This counter example (mostly) works because Aaron first identifies "big houses" as being a noun group, so Betty can adjust the noun group with the red adjective.
I don't think the language itself implies any of that. That's just our brains inferring something about the blanks for us when there is a lack of context.
I mean, if you were reading a book, a good author might go into detail about how "great dragons" or "green dragons" are a different species from "dragons" before using both in long chains of adjectives. Maybe it is left ambiguous on purpose, just to exercise the reader's imagination.
Only because of adjective ordering. The fact that great usually comes before green means that when the usual word order is reversed, it is because "great" is binding closer than normal for some other reason besides normal adjective precedence.
So yes, it does imply something, but only because "green great" is considered wrong.
Came here to post the same link. English adjective order is one of those things that we're never taught as speakers of English as a first language, but I'd imagine it's taught to those learning it as a second language.
Another great example of a rule that exists in English that native speakers generally follow without knowing, but is taught to learners of English as a second language, is the rule of which adjectives form comparatives and superlatives by suffixing '-er' and '-est', and which by prefixing 'more' and 'most'.
As a native English speaker I was never taught a rule that explains why I would say hotter or wrigglier or redder or wildest or shiniest, but more emphatic, more open, most excellent or most orange. I'd always assumed adjective -er and -est suffixes were just irregular, with no pattern to them at all.
But it turns out there's basically a simple rule - if it ends in '-y' or has only one syllable, you suffix it; otherwise you use the 'more' or 'most' form. It's remarkably solid as a rule, and even when I come up with a word that sounds sort of right to my ear that doesn't follow the rule - like, for example, I can kind of see 'wickedest' as being a valid form - it turns out that if I think about it, it probably doesn't sound right after all, and I would probably prefer 'most wicked'.
It's good practice to check your intuition on things like this against a searchable corpus. According to http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/, "most wicked" just barely edges out "wickedest" in terms of frequency, 22 to 20.
It's a practice, but as an English speaker I have the privilege of making my own corpus up as I go along. When I say I find I prefer 'most wicked' to 'wickedest', I'm expressing the subjective opinion that I think I would fall in the 22 part of that corpus, not the 20 - if anything I wrote about relative wickedness were to make it into the COCA corpus that number would go up to 23.
But that would be true even if I were in the minority. The corpus is just going to reflect usage, and my usage is as valid as any other, so... while it provides some sort of peer validation, it doesn't answer the question of whether one form or another is 'more correct', only whether one is 'more common'. Or commoner, maybe. No, I'm going to stick with more common.
As a non-native English speaker, I find this to be a precious suggestion. I'm going to try and use it for those situations of uncertainty between two forms. I usually resort to some specific google search, but that's often ineffective, especially if the "wrong version" is pretty common among a subset of international speakers.
"Simple," "narrow," "clever," and "quiet" are usually listed as exceptions to the rule, and their suffixed superlative forms also usually appear in dictionaries.
Good point. A google search also shows that since "fun" has only recently migrated from a noun to an adjective, the -er/est forms are not yet accepted, but will likely become standard over time.
Have you considered that it may have something to do with the adjectiveness or adverbiality of the word? Words that are exclusively single-use readily take the -er and -est suffixes, whereas those that perform double or triple duty as nouns and/or verbs as well (perhaps as inflected forms) are less apt to sound correct when suffixed.
Since -ly is an adverbizing suffix, most anything ending in -ly could also end in -lier or -liest. A dual-purpose word might generate ambiguity when using -er, because -er is also used to transform a noun or verb into an associated noun, much like -ing changes a verb.
"Opener" could be an adjective meaning less enclosed, or it could be a person or device that opens things.
Hot may become hotter and hottest, but heated can only become more heated, because it is already heat and -ed, and the suffixes won't combine. Old becomes older and oldest, but aged only becomes more aged. Red -> redder -> reddest; rouged -> more rouged.
Likewise, the -tic suffix does not combine. Emphatic is already an adjective form of emphasis. The -er and -est suffixes tend to attach more easily to a word that was originally a modifier rather than a noun or verb, because only a few suffixes that modify part of speech combine. I wonder if it would be better to be "most emphatic" or "most emphasized"?
The rules are complicated because English grabs vocabulary from so many other languages, and the words with germanic, romance, greek, or other etymologies don't always play well by the same rules.
Native English speakers are somehow able to apply etymologically consistent alteration rules to words based on the qualities of their sound rather than by their actual source language. That's how we got "cherry". The French word was "cerise", which was imported as "cherries". Obviously, by English grammar, a word ending in the /s/ or /z/ sound is a plural. So you chop off the /z/ to get the singular "cherry". English has sort of a Procrustean Bed approach to word acquisition. If it don't fit, we makes it fit.
I'd considered it when I had assumed it was a somewhat irregular pattern, but as I say, it turns out there is a rule and that isn't it.
You're right that '-ed' suffixes prevent '-er'/'-est' being appended even if they don't add a second syllable to their root, though in most cases '-ed' makes a word multisyllabic so forces it down the 'most' route. 'bored' or, as you say, 'rouged' are monosyllabic exceptions, though. And that's in spite of there being no awkward sound created - you could certainly say 'boreder' (it's pronounced just like 'border' or 'boarder'), but it's not a word. English is weird.
But with 'open', I don't see your point. It's interesting, in fact, that even though the word 'opener' is a valid word, in the context of a 'can opener', say, it is not a valid comparative for open. It is wrong to say 'The light through the large window makes this room much opener than that one' - you should say it makes it 'much more open' instead. But you could say it made it 'much brighter'.
Opener was an example of a potentially ambiguous word. That may be why the superlative -er is not allowed. The noun-forming -er prevails over the adjective-forming -er.
Nope, open takes 'more' because it's bisyllabic, not because it avoids a collision with the noun 'opener'. Lighter, warmer, cooler... all common enough verb-based nouns that collide with comparatives and don't take 'more' because they're monosyllables.
Your simpler explanation is certainly cleverer than mine, by far. My narrower criterion obviously has several counterexamples, so I should probably be quieter about it until I can gather more supporting evidence.
English is complicated. Let's not pretend that we know about some intentionally engineered structure in it when we're really just noticing patterns and correlations.
I distinctly remember being taught the one syllable rule in elementary school in the US. There are, of course, some exceptions, like "narrower" and "quietest," and "stupidest."
To me, "most stupid" sounds hipster or foreign, while stupidest just sounds right - in normal speech. "He is the most stupid" is perhaps more memorable for sounding off: It's natural to emphasize "most".
Is he more stupid or stupider? I would say stupid, stupider, stupidest, red, redder or more red, reddest, and brilliant, more brilliant, most brilliant, but smart, smarter, smartest.
As the article says, adjective order seems to be more or less universal. Off the top of my head, the expected order is "big red plane", "iso punainen lentokone" and "ookina akai hikouki" in English, Finnish and Japanese... although French mixes up things by putting the noun in the middle for "grand avion rouge"!
This could be a reasonable comparison had you not chosen one of the irregular adjectives that places itself before the noun. The large majority of adjectives in French come after. (Though some can come in both positions, differing in meaning depending on placement.)
One of the few things I remember perfectly from my years taking French in middle/highschool is the idea of BANGS adjectives. If it's about Beauty, Age, Number, Goodness, or Size then it comes before the noun. If it's about something else such as color or temperature or whatever it comes after the noun.
There are probably a few exceptions, but it worked remarkably well during my few years.
"Big red" was the example chosen by the article, not me. And it seems a rather reasonable choice to me, it's French that's being weird here ;)
But the noun placement is actually irrelevant here, as the point is that "grand" still precedes "rouge", and you'd never say "rouge avion grand" or even "avion rouge grand".
It actually reinforces the rule, which is why linguistics requires a large number of languages for any sort of fundamental rules to emerge. Working from a single language, or from a very small set of languages that seem somehow to fit together if you apply enough force (like Latin and English), you wind up with those silly sentence diagrams I used to have to do in elementary school. (You know — the system that blew a fuse if you tried to use it on anything a human being would actually say in ordinary conversation.)
In French it becomes easier both to see that "big" modifies the composite entity "red plane", and that there is a difference in kind between the two "adjectives" (which now looks like too broad a term to be really useful). It's not just a matter of word order (syntax), there's a semantic hierarchy in play as well.
Actually, I don't think it's specific to English. In Russian, you can say "Red Big Barn", but it also sounds wrong. So I'm guessing it's similar in other languages.
I don’t recall ever being taught anything about adjective order, but I did pick it up naturally. Or not. I’m really not sure.
Some light googling seems to indicate that in German (my native language) the adjective order doesn’t really matter, but some say it actually does (citing pretty much exactly the same rules as in the linked article).
To my ears „grüner, großer Drachen“ doesn’t sound as correct as „großer, grüner Drachen“, but maybe that’s just my knowledge of English leaking into my German. It doesn’t sound entirely incorrect to me, either, not in the same way “green great dragon” does. Maybe German does have the same rules about adjective order, but they aren’t as strong? Maybe a teacher would put a wiggly line under wrongly ordered adjectives, but it wouldn’t actually be a serious mistake, just a weird stylistic choice?
Also, it’s entirely possible I actually was taught about adjective order, but have forgotten all about it. If you learn English for nine years (with either four or five lessons per week) you do lots of reading and writing, especially during the later years, actual texts from the real world and actual essays. It‘s very possible I picked it up through that and it was never necessary to explicitly teach me about adjective order.
One ordering German (allegedly) has, which I was taught, but assume native speakers are largely unaware they follow (if they do), is 'time/manner/place' in adverbial phrases. The idea is that it is more correct in German to say that you are going tomorrow (time) by bus (manner) to the airport (place), than to say that you are going by bus to the airport tomorrow, or to the airport tomorrow by bus. English cares a lot less about this ordering, but apparently in German we must morgen mit dem Bus zum Flughafen gehen, and it would be incorrect to instead go zum Flughafen mit dem Bus morgen.
Yeah, totally! I didn’t pay any attention in German class in elementary school at all, so I’m totally unable to recite any rules (and I’m not even sure whether we were ever taught that explicitly), but that ordering totally exists and the incorrect sentence you just made up is actually completely incorrect. It’s not just a stylistic blunder (but people would still understand what you are trying to say).
I also remember being explicitly taught about some similar (but different) ordering in English, though I have mostly forgotten about it. I think time is always supposed to come last or something?
So “we are going to go to the airport with the bus tomorrow” would be correct (placing tomorrow at the beginning of the sentence would be, too, and would be the variant I would personally prefer), while “we are going to go to the airport tomorrow with the bus”, while still correct, would not be something you’d want to write.
Or maybe I’m misremembering, because that second sentence seems correct to me, just placing more of an emphasis on the means of transportation than the first one (i.e. you would use that one when someone already knows about your plans, but asked you how you will get to the airport). I don’t know. This is all a haze. I remember something about time and putting it last.
Your intuition is correct. “We are going to go to the airport tomorrow by bus" is fine, it just emphasizes the mode of transportation.
Note "by bus" and not "with the bus", which is technically correct ("How are you getting to the airport?" "We're going with the bus.") but sounds a bit odd; "We're taking the bus" or "We're going by bus" would be more natural.
After considering it more, I realized the only case in which "with the bus" is acceptable is when you are referring to "the bus" as a group of people, where you could plausibly say "the bus group". And that is why I considered changing the example to "with the shuttle" (as that sounded more plausible to me): because you are more likely to know a group of people on a shuttle than an entire bus.
Adverbs and adverbial phrases can move pretty freely in English. These all sound fine to me:
we are going to go to the airport by bus tomorrow
we are going to go by bus to the airport tomorrow
tomorrow, we are going to go to the airport by bus
we are going to go to the airport tomorrow by bus
we are going to go tomorrow to the airport by bus
The last sentence sounds a little more awkward, but if you're emphasizing when the event is occurring, it would be fine. Similarly, in the right context:
to the airport, we are going to go by bus tomorrow
by bus, we are going to go to the airport tomorrow
Thanks for confirming my hazy German grammar memories. I had the impression it was a strong rule, but I also learned a lot of subjunctive and genitive forms that are pretty much unused in spoken German, so I didn't want to overstate the situation with time/manner/place sequencing in case it was a similar case of book-rules versus real life.
No, no, that’s quite alright. See, it did sound wrong to me but I couldn’t come up with anything better on the spot so I left it that way. “With the bus” is the German construction, so an easy mistake to make.
I remember studying French. In French, most adjectives come after the noun they modify (ciel bleu, blue sky), but some come before (grande maison, big house). We were taught the acronym: BAGS: beauty, age, goodness, size, to determine what came before the noun. So a big blue house would be grande maison bleue. A pretty girl is a jolie fille. An old man is a vieil homme. A bad idea is a mauvaise idée. I doubt native french speakers learn this explicitly, but when your learning it as a second language you need shortcuts to understand what sounds intuitively correct and incorrect to natives.
I learned a slightly more elaborate version of the rule -- tekamolo (Temporal, Kausal, Modal, Lokal). This rule adds reason (Kausal) in between time and manner, so for example I expect if you were taking the bus because of the rain, you would want to say morgen wegen des Regens mit dem Bus zum Flughafen gehen.
English also has some special meaning around verb ordering.
If you say 'expencive ugly car' you want to make a subjective statment about cost vs 'ugly expencive car' when you want to make an ascetic statement about an expencive car.
So, I think the general rule is context specific before innate trates. What about German?
It's convenient (for speakers of other European languages, at least) that German grammarians and scholars were so influenced by Latin that the relevant technical terms in German are all directly borrowed from Latin.
If they'd called it Zeit, Grund, Art, Lage, it would probably be a lot harder for both of us to remember! (Those are native German words for time, reason, manner, place.)
It was taught, but I ignored it. I think most people learn languages by pattern matching.
I never tried to remember the rules, I just read a lot and know if it sounds OK or not (or sometimes I don't). Using the rules on the fly would be too slow, anyway.
For languages close enough to english, the methods of teaching are reasonably organic, as well. I don't remember learning this, discovering it later in preparations for TOEFL. I Can't speak for all, however.
I was a bit disappointed that this article focused on "pure" adjectives without mentioning demonstrative and possessive modifiers. I learned about adjective order differences between languages way back in the 1970s when I took my first course in linguistics. These differences can be quite striking between noncognate languages like English and Chinese. Both in English and in Chinese, most grammatical relationships in sentences are communicated by word order rather than by inflection of words. But the word order rules can differ, particularly in the order of demonstrative versus possessive modifiers of nouns (what we call "adjectives" in English). In English, it is very anomalous to say * "my that book," as the standard word order would be "that book of mine," but in Chinese it is expected to say, "我的那本書," which corresponds to the anomalous word order in English. And so on for most phrases like those contrasted between English and Chinese. One thing that gives native speakers of Chinese an "accent" in English, besides phonology, is grammar differences like that, and of course the same is true when a native speaker of English speaks Chinese as a second language.
I was thinking something similar but along a different line of thought using English alone. Possessive modifiers behave differently than other "pure" adjectives and whether it's anaphors.
1) Jim's red barn
1a) My red barn
2) Red Jim's barn (Not awkward like in the headline example, but the meaning has changed completely)
2b) * Red my barn (invalid, period. even if my -> mine - I can do this word order in Korean or Japanese easily due to more explicit case marking)
We have to start using some syntactic movement to make the construct syntactically acceptable and semantically natural and equivalent, but doing so makes it possible to be free with word order:
3) Jim's barn that is red
3a) My barn that is red
4) Red barn that is Jim's
4a) Red barn that is mine (my -> mine)
5) Barn that is red and Jim's
5a) Barn that is red and mine
6) Barn that is Jim's and red
6a) Barn that is mine and red
The preferences aren't as clear-cut to me as in the headline clause, but we'd rather keep the possessive separate from the pure adjective (3-4 > 5-6, higher is more natural). Using only "pure" adjectives, it looks like the semantic binding preference still sticks though:
7) Big red barn =>
7a) Red barn that is big
7b) Big barn that is red
7c) Barn that is red and big
7d) Barn that is big and red
Naturalness: 7b > 7a and 7d > 7c. And since 7d > 7b, we have 7d > 7c >= 7b 7a. I'm thinking 7b > 7c but wasn't quite sure because both sound awkward and comparing two mildly awkward clauses is probably not valid here.
But hopefully other native speakers roughly agree on the precedence of awkwardness with me and understand why this article is just the tip of the iceberg.
The same for Italians. We do not use nouns as modifiers, except for some specific situations.
You can easily spot an Italian (or some other romance-language native speaker) for his/her resistance to adjectivization.
That, and the over-abundant use of terms derived from Latin (wouldn't have "latin-derived terms" sounded more anglosaxon?).
Interesting subject that I hadn't thought much about, but the cutesy writing in the beginning almost stopped me from finishing. Fortunately I did finish, as the meat of the article is farther down.
In summary, it turns out that we subconsciously order adjectives, most likely by intrinsic quality.
That order is "general opinion or quality ('exquisite,' 'terrible'), specific opinion or quality ('friendly,' 'dusty'), size, shape, age, color, origin, and material."
Im curious if anyone has looked at examples of writing that have short sentences or phrases around the adjectives for example:
When I was a child we would visit grandma's farm. There was a barn there I loved to explore. It was big, it was red, it smelled of hay and had been abandoned for years.
vs
The big red hay-scented abandoned barn.
And if the phrases follow the ordering rules as much as strings of adjectives. Further, if there was a strong correlation, what would that say to us about language and maybe even brain structure?
It would be interesting as well to know if that construct, which comes to mind as a way to highlight intentionally out of order adjectives, is actually used that way commonly or I'm just cherry picking random examples in my head.
I doubt there's any set rule but it seems to depend on strength of association. For example it's natural to say "red big toe" because "big toe" is already a strong association. Another case where "big" has a stronger association than color would be "white big brother".
On the other hand "red barn" has its own strong association [1]. Hypothetically if we lived in a community of farmers where "big barn" and "small barn" were structures with very different purposes (but color didn't matter much), it may be possible to conceive of "red big barn" instead.
> "red big toe" because "big toe" is already a strong association.
That's because "big toe" is a compound noun that refers to one of your innermost toes only. "big red toe" and "red big toe" mean different things. The set of things they could refer to is different. In your barn example the same thing is true.
I see your point about the compound noun, but is there something in between when we care more about size than color? I'm thinking of a phrase like "we all went fishing and caught little fish, except for John who caught a black-striped big fish". Does this sound natural to anyone else?
Apologies if this seems like an inappropriate fork, but the author uses a convention in the introductory paragraph that I find jarring, at best, and I wonder if anyone knows what it's called? It's this (emphasis added):
"...You're not wrong (though not entirely right, because descriptivist linguistics): An intuitive code governs..."
Is there a name for this? It feels, to me, like an "abbrev" or something, where the speaker wants to either convey cleverness or assume common understanding with the audience. Maybe it could be called a "redditism" - that's where I think I normally see the form. Does it have a name? Just curious...
Why does "large red barn" sound wrong, despite the supposed synonymic status of "big" and "large"? Or, if it doesn't sound wrong, why does it tend to give the impression of a very different meaning?
I don't think there are such things as pure synonyms, and I also don't believe that "big" and "red" are distinct adjectives in the headline phrase. Rather, they have formed a new "adjective phrase" that has new meaning beyond the sum of the meanings of the individual words. This isn't so strange, the words themselves have more meaning than the sum of the letters' meaning.
Thus if you say "red big barn", not only are you avoiding the meaning of the more orthodox phrase, you're showing off that you're not describing it the way others do. If I called a red balloon green, you'd point that out too and think I spoke funny. Same thing here.
"Big red barn" is not just saying that the barn is big and also red. It conveys the sense of a certain type of barn, in a certain part of the world, in a certain era. Surely if we were to find some large cattle shack in the Scottish highlands and paint it red, it would fail to become a "big red barn". Or if we found some Sound-of-Music-esque farm building in Switzerland and we diligently painted it, that too would fail to become a "big red barn".
The most amazing part of all this, to me, is how blind everyone is to it.
"Big red barn" is not just saying that the barn is big and also red. It conveys the sense of a certain type of barn, in a certain part of the world, in a certain era.
That's because of the color. Skim milk, lime, iron oxide, and linseed oil turns out to make a nice hardwearing paint, and is dark enough to make the interior a bit warmer. The recipe caught on among US farmers in the 19th century and red barns became a distinctive US style.
The most amazing part of all this, to me, is how blind everyone is to it.
Possibly because it only exists in your imagination.
It doesn't. Certainly not as wrong as "red large barn". It might sound unfamiliar because it's not a cliche, but it sounds like a perfectly valid English noun phrase.
If you wander around the children's department of a book shop (especially here in the UK) you would soon realise what a ridiculous statement that is.
I was in Waterston's children's department (UK bookseller chain) this weekend and found myself amazed at the sheer diversity of kids books. There was a multitude of amazing kids titles full of bonkers ideas and fascinating fun prose (a lot of it made up of made up words and interesting sounds). There were also weird and wonderful illustrations to join them.
Myself and my kids browsed and laughed and (in one case - 'Goodbye Mog' - cried (although the language of the book is traditional, the subject matter - death - was unusual for a kids book)). lemony Snicker is also a case of inventive ideas rather than inventive language. But we picked up all sorts of weird books with strange language and big colourful pictures.
I came back impressed thinking that the kids book market was in a healthy imaginative state and wishing I went to 'rea'l book shops more often — you don't get a real sense of what is out there from an online bookstore. I'd forgotten how wonderful browsing was.
> you don't get a real sense of what is out there from an online bookstore. I'd forgotten how wonderful browsing was.
Yeah, I've found great stuff just browsing near other category-sorted books in a university library. It's so disappointing that nothing similar exists online, either for fiction or nonfiction.
I'd love to see someone build a properly "curated" virtual bookstore with a great interface. Sell me things I don't yet know I want. Give me weird niches like occult bookstores as well. This can all exist online, but nobody has really done it.
That's interesting. I was reading about Lojban the other day, and I was thinking to myself that the placement of "sumti" around a given "selbri" was complicated to remember. For example, the word "vecnu" (meaning "sell" in English) is used like this:
x1 x2 vecnu x3
where x1 is the seller, x2 is the good being sold, and x3 is the buyer.
But I guess now that I think about it, English is just as full of arbitrary ordering rules, even though we have directional indicators like "x1 sells x2 to x3".
> indicators that are not always used or needed: "she sold it him".
I've never seen that kind of construction used except by very young children or non-native English speakers coming from languages where the role of the prepositions would instead be served by inflecting the noun or pronoun. I don't think its an example of a case where those things aren't required in English, insofar as "required" means anything in a natural language.
"She sold it him" is extremely archaic speech, but in general you're quite wrong -- consider "She sold him a car". "Dative"[1] constructions in English have a fairly regular alternation with order-reversed double accusatives:
"I bought a dress for my daughter" / "I bought my daughter a dress"
"You should download Drawn for me" / "You should download me Drawn" (example lifted from my little sister, who produced the second of these -- this is evidence of a living rule allowing the alternation)
"My father gave this to me" / "My father gave me this"
By this rule, it would be correct to say *"she sold him it", which is not actually correct. But the problem there is that the pronoun "it" is too weak to occupy that position in the sentence, not that prepositions are required in constructions like those.
[1] Dative constructions are so called because they correspond to uses of the dative ("giving") case in languages with a dative case. English has no dative case, but a number of English grammatical constructions have been named after it.
I'd rather you not try to speak for my experience, since clearly you have no basis for doing so. In any case, you are wrong, possibly because you are confusing two different constructions for the same construction.
> Here's an easier example: "I told him that." instead of "I told that to him."
That's not the same construction as "She sold it him" in place of "She sold it to him"; its a different construction in which changes to word order conveys the same relationship that is conveyed by prepositions in the form with preopositions. The same construction would be "I told that him".
There's a difference between being able to simply drop the prepositions and with there being an alternative mechanism of using word order to replace the prepositions.
You're just moving the goalposts here. Look upthread and you'll see yourself saying that we're talking about examples "where those things [directional indicators like the preposition to] aren't required in English". You've already picked up two comments pointing out that gioele made an obvious mistake when referencing a rule we're all familiar with. Since the only claim was that directional prepositions "are not always used or needed" even when they're permitted, the details of how you might avoid using them are completely irrelevant -- it's sufficient that it's possible to omit them.
> Look upthread and you'll see yourself saying that we're talking about examples "where those things [directional indicators like the preposition to] aren't required in English".
And you'll see in the same post that I quoted that that I criticized not the concept that the indicators were not required, but the particular example given as being a poor example as it was not an example of a construction that was idiomatic English in current use by native speakers.
"I don't think its an example of a case where those things aren't required in English" in reference to a particular construction is not a claim that there are not other constructions which would be a valid example.
I think a better example is "she sold him it", which we interpret as "she sold it to him" (instead of your example, which means "she sold him to it", which is weird).
In French some adjectives come after the noun, some come before, and even though my French is not that great, I know enough for some reason to have that gut feeling that "le grand rouge <noun>" sounds weird, and it should be "le grand <noun> rouge". Interesting how even with a second language these habits become ingrained.
What if it has something to do with the adjectives that are most important/specific? Suppose I were categorizing my big barns by color, but not my little barns (Nobody cares about the little barns). My red big barn is pretty standard, but my green big barn is hard to see because it's camouflaged.
I can see it going the other way around depending on the emphasis of the narrative. For example, if I were to say "Oh, it was a big, red barn", that sounds wrong, because "red" isn't something you'd usually emphasize. Whereas "It was a red, big barn!" sounds good.
Red Big Barn does not always sound wrong to me. If there are ten big barns and ten small barns, and one of the big barns is red, I would call it the red big barn, not the big red barn. But if there is just one isolated barn, and it is red and big, then red big barn does sound weird to me.
That was covered in the article. Disrupting the default order allows you to put emphasis on certain words, in your case, you'd want the color adjective to stand out. The other option, which I don't think the article covered, would be to change the rhythm and speed of the phrase slightly and put an audible emphasis on red.
As Partee points out, switching up the order of adjectives allows you to redistribute emphasis. (If you wish to buy the black small purse, not the gray one, for instance, you can communicate your priorities by placing color before size).
“varnished blistered wood” describes wood which is blistered, if such a thing can happen, whereas “blistered varnished wood” says the varnish is blistered which makes more sense. Just a poor example I think.
Your example is an exception to the rule, though. Usually, two adjectives don't modify each other.
In fact, I find your second example a bit ambiguous because of that very fact -- it could mean that the varnish is blistered or that the wood is blistered. The first seems to make more sense in terms of semantics, and the second seems to make more sense in terms of grammar.
while "bad little dog" sounds better than "little bad dog", "big bad dog" sounds better than "bad big dog". I wonder if that means that we might be subconsciously interpreting strings from right to left, and in that sense: Little(bad(dog)) would represent less our intended meaning than bad(little(dog)). Whereas Big(bad(dog)) would intuitively enhance our meaning when compared to bad(big(dog)).
In French this would be called a “boîte noire” or literally a “box black”. This seems more logical as first you identify that it is a box you are looking for, secondly that it is black.
> and you also have to guess instinctively which is right
When I was learning French in school I was taught that the adjectives that go before nouns are the BANGS adjectives: Beauty Age Number Goodness Size.
So words like tall, big , small, young old, or many are put before the noun while things like color go after.
I'm sure there are counter examples (I only took French for a few years) but it seemed to work very well as a rule of thumb for guessing if you didn't know.
Yeah! I found the article a bit shallow since it only discussed English like forms.
Spanish has the same things "perro Grande" <==> "Dog Big".
And has adjective bending forms on nouns, "perrito" <==> "small dog", "cafecito" <==> "little coffe".
Disclaimer, I am only learning Spanish, not native speaker.
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-...
It goes into some other theories on AOR (Adjective Ordering Restrictions) and I'd recommend it if you find the subject interesting. A quote from the top answer, which I enjoyed:
"I am reminded of how J.R.R. Tolkien’s mother once famously corrected him at a very early age when he said ‘a green great dragon’. She told him that it had to be ‘a great green dragon’, but when he asked her why, she couldn’t answer, thereby starting him down the road of puzzling over matters linguistic and philologic his whole life long."