Why Do We Say “Big Red Barn,” But “Red Big Barn” Sounds Wrong?
slate.com
slate.com
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."
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.
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 :)
He's a great bulldog.
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.
So yes, it does imply something, but only because "green great" is considered wrong.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> So “we are going to go to the airport with the bus tomorrow” would be correct
Actually you go by bus, or on the bus, never with the bus.
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.
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
This phenomenon is called topicalization.
- Time (TEmpo) - Causality (CAusalitá) - MOde (MOdo) - Location (LOcazione)
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.)
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'.
An example that strongly goes against the rule:
simpler (3185) / more simple (153)
simplest (2191) / most simple (87)
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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 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.
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".
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.
There are probably a few exceptions, but it worked remarkably well during my few years.
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.
"Keep going down past the big red barn until you reach the big green barn."
Despite the most distinguishing factor between the barns would be their color.
(Over a year ago, I feel old!)
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
"...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...
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/englis...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_%28linguistics%29
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_ellipsis
EDIT: Keep in mind, I was writing this response before links to the Atlantic were posted (which I haven't read yet).
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.
Imagine if Dr. Seuss tried to write something today. The big book publishers wouldn't even take a second look at his stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What an interesting and unexpected thing to find on HN :D
x1 x2 vecnu x3
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.
"I told him that." instead of "I told that to him."
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.
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 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.
«then the herdsman filled him the bowl out of which he was wont himself to drink, and he gave it him brimming with wine»
From "The Odyssey of Homer; translated by S.H. Butcher and A. Lang." available at http://www.bartleby.com/22/14.html
e.g.
She sold me the game. He told me the story. Etc.
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).
> No, the small black purse, not the small gray purse.
A writer and poet also has that in their toolbox.
Writers use these types of manipulations to change the meaning.
Complex rules that just seem natural.
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.
Now I know why.
For example, “Black box”:
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.
Adjectives can be placed in front or after a word and you also have to guess instinctively which is right.
Ex :
"Un grand homme" (a great man)
"Un homme grand" (a tall man)
Both are valid but don't mean the same thing.
Source : I'm french.
https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20great%20man a great man => un grand homme
https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20tall%20man a tall man => un grand homme
In both of these examples, the ordering is the same as English.
So yes by that logic, you're right, French is equal to or worse than English.
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.