# Is there any linguistic explantion for word order of adjectives?



## Encolpius

Hello, I was doing some English grammar tests and realized I *guessed *the proper word order of adjectives without studying any rules before. I just *felt *that was the correct word order, it sounded proper. Then I got to this website about word order and realized the Hungarian word order of adjectives is the same. Well, I do not know if all the languages use the same words order of adjectives (I know it is not true about adverbs place-time), but my question is why cannot I choose any word order, is there any linguistic explanation of word order of adjectives, is it universal? Does anybody know anything about the word order of adjectives in ancient languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin)? Thanks.


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## Nino83

If you're referring to the order  of adjectives and nouns, there's some correlation between this order and the general word order of the language. 
(S)OV languages tend to have postpositions, genitive-noun, adjective-noun (Turkish, Dravidian, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese), VO languages (SVO, VSO) tend to have prepositions, noun-genitive, noun-adjective (Celtic, Romance, Semitic, Austronesian, Bantu, Thai, Vietnamese). There are exceptions (for example, English, Finnish, Chinese).
If you're speaking about the order of different types of adjectives (size, colour, material and so on) I don't know.


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## Encolpius

Nino83 said:


> If you're speaking about the order of different types of adjectives (size, colour, material and so on) I don't know.



Yes, only that.


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## myšlenka

Encolpius said:


> [...]is there any linguistic explanation of word order of adjectives, is it universal? Does anybody know anything about the word order of adjectives in ancient languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin)? Thanks.


There is a certain tendency for adjectives to occur in an order that seems to be governed by semantic factors. Adjectives denoting intrinsic properties of the noun are placed close to the noun while adjectives denoting more relative properties are placed further away. As it is tightly connected to cognition in general it would surprise me if any of the ancient languages deviated from this.


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## ahvalj

Speaking about prehistory, the ancient word order can often be inferred from the structure of compounds. The Indo-European languages normally form compounds of the type adjective+noun, e. g.:

Hittite _šalla-kart-ātar_ ("high-heart-ness");
Old Indic _pūrṇa-māsa-_ ("full-moon");
Greek _ἀκρό-πολις_ ("high-town");
Latin _magn-animus_ ("large-soul-ed");
Gothic _hardu-hairtei_ ("hard-heart-ness");
PIE _*dus-menēs_ ("ill-mind"): Greek _δυσ-μενής_ and Old Indic _dur-manāḥ;_
PIE _*hₑsu-menēs_ ("good-mind"): _εὐ-μενής_ and _su-manāḥ;_
PIE _*somo-phₐtōr_ ("same-father"): Norse _sam-feðra,_ Greek _ὁμο-πάτωρ,_ Old Persian _hama-pitar-,_ Tocharian A _ṣoma-pācār._
There are, however, examples of the contrary word order: cp. Hittite _pattar-palḫiš_ ("wing-broad") or the epithets/names on *_-mehₑros~mohₑros _"great, famous": Greek _ἐγχεσί-μωρος_ ("spear-famous"), Gaulish _Nerto-māros_ ("strength-famous"), Ostrogothic _Theode-mir _[_Þiudi-mīr_] ("people-famous") and Old Church Slavonic _Vladi-měrъ_ ("power-famous") — though in this latter type the preceding noun is used to specify the meaning of the adjective.

P. S. (1) The word order may suddenly change: e. g. Polish, in contrast to other Slavic languages, has changed the normal order to noun+adjective. (2) The normal order may be fixed to a greater or lesser extent, e. g. in the Indo-European languages of the older type the order adjective+noun doesn't prohibit the occasional placement of the adjective elsewhere, especially in poetry and casual speech.


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## fdb

Encolpius’s question (and a very good question at that) is about the order of the individual words in a string of two or more attributive adjectives. The order of the elements in compounds is a totally different matter.


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## ahvalj

fdb said:


> Encolpius’s question (and a very good question at that) is about the order of the individual words in a string of two or more attributive adjectives. The order of the elements in compounds is a totally different matter.


It reflects the normal word order of the time when this type emerged.


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## fdb

The question is not about whether adjectives come before or after their nouns, but about the sequence of adjectives in a multi-attribute chain.


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## ahvalj

fdb said:


> The question is not about whether adjectives come before or after their nouns, but about the sequence of adjectives in a multi-attribute chain.


Yes, I haven't paid attention to #3. Sorry. Offended readers are kindly suggested to ignore the post #5.


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## Hector9

myšlenka said:


> There is a certain tendency for adjectives to occur in an order that seems to be governed by semantic factors. Adjectives denoting intrinsic properties of the noun are placed close to the noun while adjectives denoting more relative properties are placed further away. As it is tightly connected to cognition in general it would surprise me if any of the ancient languages deviated from this.



Is the order of adjectives the same in Norwegian as in English?


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## myšlenka

Hector9 said:


> Is the order of adjectives the same in Norwegian as in English?


Yes, the same ordering restrictions apply in Norwegian.


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## jazyk

I don't think the order of adjectives described by Encolpius works in Romance languages. I have just seen an ad in Czech saying _pravá italská horká čokoláda_, "real Italian hot chocolate", which I would translate into Portuguese as _o verdadeiro chocolate quente italiano, _with _verdadeiro_, an adjective, before _chocolate_, a noun. I could imagine _chocolate quente italiano verdadeiro_, but I still prefer, maybe for stylistic reasons, the order I wrote first.


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## francisgranada

jazyk said:


> ... I could imagine _chocolate quente italiano verdadeiro_, but I still prefer, maybe for stylistic reasons, the order I wrote first.


This is interesting because the word order of the adjectives, when they are all put after after the noun, seems to be _reversed _(at least in this case).


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## fdb

In French I would say “le café chaud italien véritable”, with exact inversion of the adjectives as compared with English “real Italian hot coffee”. So both in left-branching and right-branching languages there seems to be a preferred hierarchy of adjectives, with the most objective/inherent adjectives closest to the noun, and the most subjective furthest away from it.


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## Nino83

In Italian: la vera cioccolata calda italiana (by far more common) or la cioccolata calda italiana vera (less common).


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## jazyk

fdb said:


> In French I would say “le café chaud italien véritable”, with exact inversion of the adjectives as compared with English “real Italian hot coffee”. So both in left-branching and right-branching languages there seems to be a preferred hierarchy of adjectives, with the most objective/inherent adjectives closest to the noun, and the most subjective furthest away from it.


Right, maybe because the word véritable is a long adjective and gives a certain balance to the phrase when placed at the end. On the other hand, if I were to use_ vrai_, I would say _le vrai chocolat chaud italien._


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## Swatters

Whatever the word for *real* I choose, I need to have it before the noun: "Le véritable café chaud italien", "le vrai café chaud italien" ou "l'authentique café chaud italien".


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## Nino83

It depends on the adjective. 
Some adjectives must precede the noun, others can precede or follow the noun with a different meaning and others must follow the noun. 
_un mero fatto_ (a mere fact) 
_un grande uomo_ (a great man) vs. _un uomo grande_ (a big man) 
_un auto elettrica_ (an electric car) 
So in Romance languages the situation is more _fluid_.


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## Ben Jamin

ahvalj said:


> P. S. (1) The word order may suddenly change: e. g. Polish, in contrast to other Slavic languages, has changed the normal order to noun+adjective.


 I beg to differ. The "normal" generic" order in Polish is still "adjective+noun". Any Pole understanding French will instinctively translate "une maison grande" with "wysoki dom". The case is that there are also many fixed expressions where the adjective comes second, for example "czekolada mleczna" (chocolate+milk), which is a kind of brand name. The order "noun + adjective" is also used in classification lists of items, biological species and technical specifications. But all these can be regarded as exceptions from the rule.


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## Scholiast

Greetings all round

We seem to have two separate questions here: one is about the correlation of simple noun-and-adjective pairs ("une maison grande" compared with "a big house" or "wysoki dom"); the other about the order of multiple adjectives when all applied to the same noun ("A big, wise, old, fat man" as contrasted with "An old, fat, wise, big man").

In English—and of course I fully accept that this is the only language on which I am competent to observe with acute sensitivity—it is (as so often) a matter of emphatic nuance and rhetorical tendency.

Σ


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## Sibutlasi

The order of different kinds of adjectives (or adverbs, for that matter, if we extend the question to verbal 'modifiers') is in fact much more rigid than could be expected if it were just a matter of 'style' or contextual prominence ('focus'). For a classic statement to that effect I suggest Gary-John Scott's "Stacked Adjectival Modification and the Structure of Nominal Phrases", chapter 4 (pp. 91-120) in Guglielmo Cinque, ed., _Functional Structure in DP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, volume 1_, Oxford U.P., 2002. Unfortunately, although that article offers a fairly comprehensive and precise *statement* of the facts (of English), and certain cross-linguistically applicable ordering restrictions follow nicely enough, a convincing and complete *explanation* of *all* the ordering constraints that hold in this domain has not yet, to my knowledge, been offered by anybody. Ultimately, the traditional concept of 'predicability' is bound to play a key role in any proper explanation, but our linguistic ontology (our inventory of linguistic 'types') is still far too primitive to make that approach workable, which is a pity, because this is, indeed, a very interesting issue.

S.


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## Encolpius

Thank you. Sibutlasi. Bad news indeed.


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