Attributive Adjectives and Nominal Templates

Cinque (1994) and Scott (2002) propose conceptions of nominal functional structure in which a rigid and highly elaborated series of functional heads regulates the distribution of attributive adjectives according to the class of property that they denote. The following are their proposed adjectival hierarchies:

(1)

1. a. Serialization of adjectives in event nominals poss[essive] > cardinal > ordinal > speaker-or[iented] > subj[ect]-or[iented] > manner > thematic

   Serialization of adjectives in object-denoting nominals poss[essive] > cardinal > ordinal > quality > size > shape > color > nationality

   (Cinque 1994:96)

2. b. determiner > ordinal number > cardinal number > subjective comment > ?evidential > size > length > height > speed > ?depth > width > weight > temperature > ?wetness > age > shape > color > nationality/origin > material > compound element > NP

   (Scott 2002:114)

The main interest of these heterogeneous and apparently arbitrary hierarchies stems from the hypothesis that the heads regulating adjective order may form part of the linear functional sequence often assumed to regulate nominal morphosyntactic and semantic properties, a connection that Cinque (1999) investigated with respect to adverbials and clausal functional structure. Viewed in this light, these hierarchies make a clear and testable prediction: movement aside, and disregarding exceptional word orders linked to marked information structures, if two adjectives belong to different classes, only one relative order of the two should be possible. Section 1 tests this prediction against data gathered from www.google.co.uk. The data attest to a far greater freedom of order among multiple adjectives than predicted by the models in (1). Section 2 scrutinizes the wider project of relating adjective orders and nominal morphosyntax and semantics through a rigidly ordered functional sequence.

1 The Data

The choice of Google as a huge, but unregulated, corpus was made on the basis of the finding that, although the British National Corpus contains 262,838 tokens of pairs of attributive adjectives, over 76% of adjective pairs occur only once, and therefore trivially show only one order (Malouf 2000). For a study that aims to investigate consistency of ordering of adjective pairs, then, even the BNC is not large enough to attribute much significance to the results.

Searches were carried out on Google for prototypical members, in English, of six classes of adjective—namely, the five lowest classes of Cinque's object-denoting hierarchy, plus the material class from Scott's hierarchy. In addition, a number of modal adjectives, which do not have a clear place in either of the taxonomies, were considered. The search terms consisted of pairs of adjacent adjectives from these classes in a specified order. As this squib is concerned solely with canonical Adj-Adj-N constructions, many examples returned by Google were irrelevant, including many cases where, for example, the Adj-Adj sequence does not modify a noun or is disrupted by punctuation (arguably indicating marked prosody and information structure), or the Adj-N sequence is idiomatic (for example, big top or new potatoes). This means that Google is highly problematic as a reliable indicator of relative frequency of different orders: too many of the items obtained must be judged ungrammatical or discarded as irrelevant, and statistical patterns are expected to be too approximate for confidence. Instead, Google was used heuristically in the study reported here, as a potential source of positive evidence for the existence of grammatical examples of certain adjective orders. All examples given below are from Google, representing the tokens judged to be most acceptable from the first 100 hits returned. Furthermore, the sites from which the examples were taken were consulted, to verify that there was no evidence for marked information structures.¹ The grammaticality judgments given do not reflect absence of a sequence of adjectives on Google, then; rather, they reflect absence of grammatical NP constituents. I use "??" to indicate that all attested Adj-Adj-N constituents found on Google are judged unacceptable by the native speakers I consulted, and "*" to indicate that no Adj-Adj-N constituents were found.

One clear division shown in the data is between the two subsective, and the four intersective, classes examined.² The four intersective classes considered are shape (illustrated here with circular), color (red), nationality (French), and material (wooden). Pairs of adjectives drawn from these classes are well...