Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site mmintl.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) Newsgroups: net.nlang Subject: Adjective order Message-ID: <565@mmintl.UUCP> Date: Tue, 6-Aug-85 16:26:16 EDT Article-I.D.: mmintl.565 Posted: Tue Aug 6 16:26:16 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 9-Aug-85 02:11:01 EDT Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT Lines: 72 This is a digest of the responses I received to my posting on adjective order. I received a request to post my old notes on the subject; alas they are long gone, and I do not have the time to try to reconstruct them. I hope the information here is useful to some of you. From pwa-b!philabs!allegra!tektronix!tekchips!sheldonn Terry Winograd mentions the adjective ordering in his book "Understanding Natural Language", 1972. He certainly wasn't the first to notice it, however. cheers, --Sheldon ...!tektronix!tekchips!sheldonn From pwa-b!philabs!ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mmar The question has been noted before, but not with any very convincing answers. The suggestions I've seen were pretty vague, and turned on the idea of inherent vs accidental properties. Thanks, Mitch Marks @ U Chicago ... ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mmar From pwa-b!philabs!prls!eva I believe that the late Henry Lee Smith Jr. had some analysis of this. Whether he ever wrote anything up is another matter; his style of Descriptivism was very much overshadowed when I had contact with him, so he may not have bothered to publish. He collaborated with George Trager, so you might look for some combination of the two names. Brian Phillips From pwa-b!philabs!ihnp4!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!michaelm Yes, it has been noticed before, and I agree that it is an extremely interesting problem! I don't have any references to "linguistic" discussions of it, but the book "A Grammar of Contemporary English" by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik (published by Longman's at the price of --eek-- $45 or so; but then, it's 1100+ pages) discusses it. This book, by the way, is a grammar of English for non-native speakers, and is one of the most complete grammars of English (or any language) that I've ever seen. That doesn't mean that it's complete, though... At any rate, the relevant sections are 5.41 and 13.65-13.68. Quirk et al note, e.g. that if the adj means something like "consisting of," "involving," or "relating to," it must be adjacent to the noun: the extravagant (pleasant, only, London) social life *the social extravagant... life a serious (city, mere,...) political problem *a political serious (...) problem I suspect that one might be able to find exceptions, and of course one would like a better characterization of what "consisting of etc." means. Quirk et al have several other classes, and discuss their relative ordering. Incidently, if your library doesn't have this book, there is an abridged version by the same authors. I don't have it, so I don't know how much it discusses this adjective question. Re other languages, Spanish is a language that (commonly) has adjectives following the noun, rather than before, but I don't have any intuitions that I would trust about adj order. Any native Spanish speakers reading this? English sometimes has long adj phrases after the noun, e.g. "a man angry at the world," but they don't seem to "stack" very well. -- Mike Maxwell