It's a dotted blue big star: on adjective ordering in a post-nominal language

ABSTRACT

Referring to a specific object sometimes requires using multiple adjectives. The ordering of the adjectives is assumed to be constrained by universal hierarchies (grammatical or conceptual). It is therefore predicted that different languages will present similar ordering preferences. The ordering in languages where adjectives appear after the noun is further expected to mirror the ordering observed in languages where adjectives appear before the noun. We investigated these predictions in prenominal (English) and postnominal (Hebrew) languages, using three different tasks: production, naturalness rating, and forced-choice. English speakers showed a robust ordering preference. The preferences in Hebrew were significantly weaker. Moreover, for some of the adjective strings, the weakly preferred orders in Hebrew did not mirror the preferred order in English. We argue that constraints on adjective ordering must include additional factors beyond the suggested hierarchies, and discuss this implication in relation to differences between prenominal and postnominal languages.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive constraints
• word order
• subjectivity
• reference resolution

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF 1824/17) and by the Alon fellowship. The authors would also like to thank Gregory Scontras for his helpful comments on the manuscript, and on adjective ordering in general.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Productions with conjunctions were too few to analyze, and most were produced by the same participants. Nevertheless, descriptively, it seems that the conjunction ‘deleted’ the preference for the N-SC order over the N-CS order in the two-adjective setting. In the three-adjective setting, all the productions with conjunctions were in the N-CSP or N-SCP orders.

2 The considerable number of excluded English-speaking participants was because we were unfamiliar with the option to prescreen based on low quality participation in previous studies. In a task like naturalness-ratings, participants can provide low effort responses, which were, in this case, uniform ratings in all trials, as well as giving high ratings to our catch trials, which included incorrect descriptions of the image (e.g., accepting the description “a big blue star” for a picture of a big red star).

3 A few obvious differences are that texture adjectives are gradable (can appear with almost, e.g., “almost smooth”), but pattern adjectives are more objective (*almost dotted, also see the faultless disagreement task, Scontras et al., 2017, 2020). Additionally, texture adjectives, unlike pattern adjective, cannot be used in prepositional phrases (e.g., *“a pillow with smoothness”, but “a pillow with dots”). Finally, texture adjectives are not denominal (at least in Hebrew and English), whereas pattern adjectives are.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Israel Science Foundation and by the Alon fellowship.