The unexpected rule of adjectival ordering in English (2016)
qz.com
qz.com
E.g. it is far less likely that you'd want to specify that the "green knife" entity is to be used for whittling. It is far more likely that you'd want to specify that the "whittling knife" is green.
Similarly you're unlikely to group 'lovely knife' as the most low-level entity to which you'd add higher leverl characterisations.
Some of the other ones though are reasonably interchangeable, as long as it is understood that the focus is slightly different each time.
E.g. a priceless old knife, and old priceless knife mean slightly different things, and you'd choose the order depending on whether you wanted to emphasize that the old knife happens to be priceless, as opposed to that the priceless knife happens to be old.
"Hand me the green knife." / "Which one? There are two: one metal and one plastic." / "The metal green knife."
"Hand me the metal knife." / "Which one? There are two: one green and one blue." / "The green metal knife."
I can't think of an example in which "the metal green knife" sounds natural.
I don't know what a whittling knife looks like, so I would be far more likely to specify that the green knife is used for whittling.
What's an absolutely fucking black magic is the use of articles. The frivolity with which a's and the's are sprinkled through an average sentence is genuinely infuriating. There are rules, but "they are more like guidelines". In reality asking native speakers why they used the here, but not there typically draws blank looks. Having used English daily for over 20 years I still have to resort to A/B testing the placement (or not placement!) of articles in my head and check which option sounds "more English."
You're spot on with the articles though. When coming from a language like Japanese that doesn't have articles the using "a" and "the" correctly is maddening.
I'm not going to try for a Bulgarian example of the difference, but here's an English vs French one
"A Paris, les oranges ont l'air ..."
"In Paris, oranges appear ..."
One could possibly add a definite article to the English sentence, but one definitely cannot remove it from the French one.
AIUI if the word sounds like it starts with a vowel sound, it's an an. If not, it's an a.
I have to say a word (or abbreviation, or acronym) out loud very occasionally to determine if 'an' is appropriate -- and reading the writing of North American english speakers throws me when an 'an' is used in front of a word that, in my head, starts with a consonant sound.
The obvious example being 'an herb' - because in Australia (and indeed England) the h is pronounced, consequently it would normally be 'a herb'.
There are minor mental flurries with abbreviations that some people pronounce differently, I'm sure.
Coming from a language that has no articles at all, it was by far the hardest thing to learn.
Hard rules about where you should and shouldn't put articles are few. The rest is pure feeling and experience.
"The book rested on a shelf" and "a book rested on a shelf". You use a or the if you want to draw attention to one or the other or even both. It depends on context. The book I mentioned earlier rests on the top shelf. The top shelf is above another shelf. The other shelf is the middle shelf. If there were lots of sets of shelves then the middle shelf would be a middle shelf, unless I want to call attention to it, then it is the middle shelf. A red toy lorry lies on the middle shelf. The red lorry has a black steering wheel. The steering wheel is broken.
There is a logic to all of that - honest!
For example, for me it was very hard initially to get used to always explicitly putting in the subject of a sentence, because i my native language the subject is often implied (our verbs vary a lot more than in English, so saying 'I wash the dishes' - 'eu spăl vasele' instead of 'wash the dishes' - 'spăl vasele' is redundant, the verb form already tells you it's me who is doing the washing).
Look at French - exact same idea, but consistently used, so it's a piece of cake to learn. English in comparison is just... PRNG. Here you need them, here you don't, unless you do, but it would still sound better if they weren't here.
"These are times that try men's souls" vs. "These are the times that try men's souls."
"I need answers" vs. "I need the answers"
"I have fear that .." vs. "I have a fear that .."
Native English speakers "know" which "sound better"; many ESL kids simply do not.
Many languages express the verb "to fear" as "to have fear" (tener miedo, avoir peur) so to insert an article ("I have a fear" ...") becomes almost psychologically problematic, it's "unlearning" plus learning.
- English generally wants singular nouns tagged with a determiner unless the noun is being used to refer to the type of something rather than an instance of something, or in more than a few fixed prepositional phrases.
- Determiners, including articles, signify the importance and expectation around the question "which X".
- Definite articles are a signal to the listener/reader that the they should know which X the speaker/writer means. That's all. It has nothing to do with "specificity" as often explained by others. If the listener/reader doesn't know typically they will be triggered to ask.
- The indefinite article is a signal to the listener/reader that they don't have to know or care about "which X". It will trigger a listener/reader not to ask or wonder.
- Proper nouns don't take articles because usually the question "which John?", for example, isn't a concern.
And they do take articles when the question is a concern, in exactly the same way as other nouns. E.g., (for a highly contrived example) “The John Smith in the story of Pocahontas is not the John Smith found in a contemporary register of tradesmen in London discovered last week”.
If you worked at one of those institutions, though, you'd add an article and be specific - you work "at the university" or "at the hospital". (You'd expect the listener to infer that you mean the specific university/hospital in the area, assuming there is only one.)
Edit: More colloquially, we also have "going into town" (no article, even though it's probably a specific town that is clear from context!)
The article-less usage only seems to work for generic places (hospital/school/prison/university). It doesn't belong with a noun that refers to a person but also sort-of-refers to that person's place of business. You're "going to the doctor" or "the dentist" or "the hairdresser" - never "going to doctor". This is despite the specificity often being superfluous here - the listener might not know/care which dentist you use!
He’s gone to hospital. (Hospital is abstract, we don’t necessarily know which one)
He’s gone to the hospital. (A specific hospital, either inferring which one by context or prior knowledge)
You don't go to store though, hang out at mall, meet at restaurant, or go to bar for a drink.
I think the difference between the two usages is considering "hospital" an institution.
I also don't think a vs the requires the listener to know which specific place you're talking about, it seems to also communicate that the speaker knows what place they're talking about. "I'm going to the store to buy carrots" vs "I'm going to a store to buy carrots." Someone knows vs no one knows.
Likewise "went to school" (as a scoolchild) vs "went to the school" (to collect someone, or to teach). "At university" (a student) vs "at the university" (physical location, for any reason). "Went to prison" (as a criminal) vs. "went to the prison" (to visit his brother, or to fix their telephones). "Does she go to church?" (to church services) vs. "did you go to the church?" (to see the stained glass).
"Go to the doctor" is a bit different, the doctor isn't an institution, he's a person. Although I think that implies you went for medical reasons, if you stopped by to pick up some paperwork, you might say "I have to stop at the doctor's" i.e. his rooms. But maybe that's also because you would probably talk to the receptionist anyway. But "went to the barber" implies you had a shave, while you might "stop at the barber's" to pick someone up.
the carries with it the implication of (о чем я уже говорил) or (вы знаете уже какой)
a means один _____ (но может быть вы не знаете кокой)
Ø (no article) means the noun is probably abstract.
-----BREAK BREAK-----
Where you might get all twisted up and confused is with concrete collective/uncountable nouns. These are exceptions and work very differently. Examples are: pizza, foliage, pasta, people, etc. You simply have to memorize them.
the still means the X that has a clear referent because we have already discussed it or it's clear from surrounding context
a can be one of two things: - a countable quantity of an uncountable noun, e.g., "a pizza" usually means "a unit of pizza; a pizza pie" - shorthand for a type of or category of an uncountable noun, e.g., "linguine is a pasta" means "linguine is a type of pasta"
J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography:
> When [Tolkien] was about seven he began to compose his own story about a dragon. ‘I remember nothing about it except a philological fact,’ he recalled. ‘My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “a green great dragon”, but had to say “a great green dragon”. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.’
I remember the scientific paper that included the phrase "I smoke crack rocks" in the sentence "we observed vaporized iodide (I) erosion on soil in an experiment where we saw I smoke crack rocks.
"Great" is capitalised here (in Great Dane) as it is now part of the name of the breed, rather than an adjective, whatever its origin.
Scientists prefer ‘white shark’ these days. There being no other smaller species of ‘white shark’ from which they need to distinguish.
That you can infer that ‘great’ connotes something different because of its position in the adjective sequence is an argument in favor of the idea that the sequencing is semantically meaningful, not against it.
> absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife
For instance, "An expensive, peaty fifteen year old Scotch" is a potential counter-example, because [fifteen year old scotch] is the specific item you're talking about.
"Barman, a peaty large|double Scotch for me please" would also be a counterexample, I think, because the key here is that you want a [large|double Scotch]. Large and Double are both size descriptors for a bar drink in different parts of the world.
And I'm not seeing why "I received a hand-painted wooden Native-American jewellery box as a present" would somehow be wrong, if I wanted to emphasize the origin, over "I received a hand-painted Native-American wooden jewellery box as a present".
Writing grammar rules is obsessing over a few phrases, and declaring everything that doesn't follow the pattern you've found in those an exception.
My pet theory is that it isn't a decline of brain ability but rather a psychological shift: Adults expect results, get frustrated more quickly, can't tolerate speaking "silly" for long etc.
Totally agree. An adult working full time on acquiring a language can learn to use a foreign language at an adult level within maybe a year or so. It's just that nobody does that, because there are other things to do...
Children literally need decades to reach an adult level of competence in their native language, despite 24/7 immersion.
Language learning techniques for adults (studying abstract grammar, cramming vocabulary) are very effective and kids don't learn the way.
There is one major disadvantage that adults have though, and that's at acquiring correct pronunciation. I think I've never met a person in my life who didn't learn a language from a very young age and who didn't sound slightly off to a native speaker.
There might be the rare exceptional talent who can do that, but to a first approximation it's not possible as an adult anymore.
...
> There is one major disadvantage that adults have though, and that's at acquiring correct pronunciation. I think I've never met a person in my life who didn't learn a language from a very young age and who didn't sound slightly off to a native speaker.
I think an adult working full-time on their pronunciation would get within the native range of variation fairly quickly. Even native speakers only adjust their accent very slowly after moving to a new area, but accent coaches can speed up that process a lot. It's just that it involves a lot of tedious practice consciously controlling your tongue when you'd rather just speak freely and have your subconscious take care of tongue movement. So most people who do that are actors or public speakers, for whom pronunciation matters a great deal. The average language learner has better things to do...
I'd be interested in learning more about how to do that! I don't think I've ever seen it in real life.
Consider for example what it would sound like if you made a wild grammatical mistake in your native language, or completely misused some word. You wouldn't sound like a foreign speaker, but sloppy, tired, or maybe like you were making some sort of joke. I wouldn't even know where to start in order to get to that level in a second language.
For example, in my native language we don't have the 'th' sounds from English. Most learners approximate the voiceless 'th' with 'f' ('fing', 'frow') and the voiced 'th' with 'z' ('zis fing', 'zat fing'), because they don't even know what to do to pronounce the real sound.
Even worse, many consonants and vowels have variations between languages even when they are recognized as the same consonant. R is a famous case, but for example, the Slavic and Latin 't' sound is harder than the English or German 't' - I pronounce my native t with my tongue closer to my teeth than when I'm speaking English.
However, one someone points out the specific differences and helps you practice the right tongue movements, it's generally easy to replicate if you're pacient and try for a while. There may be exceptions, like learning to roll your R sounds, to vary pitch or learning click sounds (haven't tried any of these myself, so maybe they're not that hard either).
I grew up with a couple, I had some special instruction in high school to correct the fact that I said my R’s with the same mouth positions used for W’s; I also had a persistent issue with saying “tr” as a mushy kind of “ch” on one side of my mouth that I only finally corrected in, like, my mid-forties.
And yeah, once I looked up how to properly pronounce that “tr” it didn’t take too long to fix it.
Basically, learners have a tendency to hear the second language through the phonological 'filter' of the first language. They assign incoming speech sounds to categories based on the cues that are used in their first language rather than the second language, so they actually perceive the sounds in a different way from native speakers. This is a concept known as categorical perception. For example, Japanese learners of English tend to perceive English /l/ and /r/ as the same sound and cannot discriminate them reliably in perception experiments. Therefore, we can speculate that they have trouble producing the sounds differentially because they don't actually hear a difference between them.
So, the first step in overcoming pronunciation issues is not necessarily to teach tongue positions, but to train perception.
That is, just like it is difficult to distinguish between "their X" and "their Y", it is also difficult to distinguish between "your X" and "their X". Maybe even more difficult, because no one tells you that the difference exists.
> For example, Japanese learners of English tend to perceive English /l/ and /r/ as the same sound and cannot discriminate them reliably in perception experiments.
I wonder what would happen if you took a group of Japanese people, taught them how to make the /l/ and /r/ sounds, by telling them how to place the toungue etc., and them told one of them to choose and make one of these sounds, and the other one to guess which one it was.
I mean, just like it is easier for one non-native English speaker to understand another non-native English speaker, because they speak more slowly and carefully, maybe it would be easier for one Japanese person to understand another Japanese person's pronounciation of /l/ and /r/, because it would be more exaggerated.
Getting basic phonology right happens way before you get to that problem.
Do you know an example of someone who has learned a second language and sounds indistinguishable from a native speaker to a native speaker? I don't, but would be curious to hear about counterexamples. I suspect maybe people who speak professionally (e.g., actors as GP suggested) might be candidates, but I don't know any...
The Swedish researchers Kenneth Hyltenstam and Niclas Abrahamsson have a series of studies looking at immigrants in Sweden who began learning Swedish as adults and who are judged to be native speakers by true native speakers who heard their speech.
In one study, they gave a very thorough battery of linguistic tests to these adult learners, and for some of them, the only test they failed to perform equal to native speakers was on their knowledge of proverbs and idioms.
The place you're most likely to find such near-native speakers is in immigrant communities.
Without having looked at the precise methodological details, it seems to broadly support my point, though:
"Our findings lead us to the conclusions that the rare nativelike adult learners sometimes observed would all turn out to be exceptionally talented language learners with an unusual ability to compensate for maturational effects and, consequently, that their nativelikeness per se does not constitute a reason to reject the critical period hypothesis."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232004616_The_robus...
(By critical period and maturational effect they refer to the hypothesis that age determines, or influences, whether you'll be able to attain a native-like level.)
1) Is it POSSIBLE for the speech of an adult language learner to be indistinguishable from a native speaker?
2) If (1) is true, are such instances common?
The reason (1) is important to ask is because a strict critical period hypothesis may rule this out by saying once the brain has matured beyond a certain point (age ~12, for example, or possibly younger for phonology), you can no longer acquire a language to the extent of a native speaker.
But there is plenty of evidence that (1) is true. In the Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson literature, they are able to find quite a few learners whose speech is indistinguishable from that of native speakers. They then run a battery of more strict tests (syntax/knowledge tests IIRC) against these learners that reveal slight differences.
However, (2) is certainly false. It's somewhat rare to find an adult learner who truly sounds like a native speaker. That, however, isn't evidence in favor of a strict critical period/maturational effects hypothesis, since there can be many reasons for failure.
My intuition is that there is much less support for a strict critical period hypothesis these days. Most people now talk about a 'sensitive period', which reflects that there are a broad range of factors that favor successful acquisition in children but that adults have decreased sensitivity to.
For cases of non-native speakers mastering an accent, one anecdote I heard of was Hugh Laurie's audition tape for the role of Dr House. The story goes that the producers of the show considered it extremely important to have the character be played such that he was quintessentially American, and were very happy with the audition tape from Hugh Laurie, who convinced them on this front - only to meet him later and be shocked at his native RP accent.
Knowing how much time and money he spent to achieve this goal, it seems to me like a complete waste of time and money. Apparently, his opinion differs. But his example makes me believe that the goal is attainable... but also explains why most people don't do it.
This is why, whenever I discuss language learning with people, I said, "Fluency is overrated. Learn as much as you can, at your own pace, for as long as you enjoy doing it." There are cognitive benefits to language learning beyond being able to speak fluently.
citation needed :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
https://www.amazon.com/Through-Language-Glass-Different-Lang...
>>a rectangular silver French old little lovely whittling green knife
I am not a native English speaker but there is a sense of something odd about this description. But (I am always confused about starting with but) I would not think anything is wrong with "a lovely old little green rectangular French silver whittling knife".
I had a team mate who always used passive voice in technical documentation. My manager always used to point it out to him but he was never able to fix it. Once he got mad and said, "Ma'am, I have no idea what you are talking about, this is the only voice I know". On his next Birthday she gifted him a copy of Lynn Truss' Eats Shoots & Leaves. He later said that was the best book gift he ever got.
In other words, write "How to achieve X", rather than "How do I do X"?
The point I want to make is that when I write documentation, and change the latter to the former, most people seem to agree it's better.
As a native speaker, but without any editorial training, this feels slightly off to me. My first edit would be something like "a lovely little old", because "lovely little" feels like it should go together. Whether that's due to alliteration or "little old lady" being a not uncommon phrase, I couldn't say for sure.
That is, my parsing of "a little lovely park" is ambiguous between "a little (lovely park)" and "a (little lovely) park". With "a lovely little park" there is no ambiguity.
To borrow some parentheses, (the big (bad wolf)) highlights the character of the wolf as being more important than it’s shape. However (the smelly (bad meat)) emphasises the bad-ness, or rotten-ness, of the meat and further describes it as smelly.
Similarly the focus of (the bad (old days)) the past, and bad is acting as an adjective for (old days).
But of course, the rule is "i before e except after c or when sounded like a, as in neighbor and weigh".
You still have exceptions like seize and weird (and being) but I think that's all among common words.
My favorite demonstation of the silliness of the rule:
‘i’ before ‘e’ except when your foreign neighbour Keith receives eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters. Weird.
Adjectives in other orders are constantly encountered as produced by native speakers.
That is a larger 8-by-10, early 1800's, lower New York, broken green whittling table.