Order of Adjective

Order of Adjective

Adjectives are among the most commonly used words in our daily conversations and usually two or more adjectives are used in a single sentence when describing a noun in English. Adjectives are of various types: Attributive adjectives such as those that suggest of quality (e.g. honest, kind etc.), quantity (e.g. many, few, little etc.), age (e.g. ancient, old, young, new, shape (e.g. square, round, oval, heart etc.), Color (e.g. white, dark, bright, reddish), origin (e.g. Chinese, French, Indian, American), material (e.g. rubber, plastic, wool, metal), purpose (e.g. sleeping, washing, racing, sport) while they are also at times predicative (that follow a linking verb and are not placed before a noun). Attributive adjectives are required to be used in the proper order and the restrictions in this regard need to be considered while using them. Adjective order is a confusing area for non-natives as well as native speakers. The rules in this regard are a little complicated and there are also disagreements and differences found in the syntactic restrictions on their ordering. Furthermore, it is also at times difficult to remember the exact ordering sequences and hence mistakes occur.

Celce-Murcia et al. (1983) in their book suggest that the order of two or more attributive adjectives used in a sentence has continued to be a source of error for speakers of English. Various grammarians have provided their proposals with regard to the ordering of adjectives. Sledd (1959), as quoted in Celce-Murcia et al. (1983)'s book, suggests the order of the elements in a noun phrase to be as follows:

Predeterminer

Core determiner

Post determiner

Intensifier

Descriptive adjective

Noun adjunct or modifier

Head noun

Here the descriptive adjective has a range of subcategories as highlighted by Bailey (1975) in her investigation. Some of these categories include coloration, measurement, shape, and subjective evaluation. This list was further detailed by Swatko (1979) who provided with an order that is generally considered for ordering of adjectives. The seven distinct sematic categories according to Swatko are ordered as follows:

Opinion (pretty)

Size (small)

Shape (round)

Condition (chipped)

Age (young)

Color (orange)

Origin (American)

Swatko (1979) suggests that the occurrence of more than three adjectives is rare while two adjective sequences is more common and hence when more than on adjective occur, this order is required to be followed.

McKinney-Bock (2009) bases the discussion in this regard on ordering restrictions and suggests that ordering restrictions among adjectives is mainly because of the underlying complexities of the projections of adjectives. The order of the adjective it is suggested is then based on the complexity of the projection containing the adjective such that the more complex a projection, the higher in the structure it is merged.

Two approaches with regard to adjective order restrictions can be found; one on the bases of semantic subclasses such as size or color, while the other is suggested to be based on functional properties. On the basis of these semantic subclasses and functional properties, the adjective order restriction can be defined and differentiated. Following is the detailed ordering suggested by Scott (2002) on the ...