The order of adjectives

This is a big red ball.

And this is a small black cat.

The point being that it would be very odd to have these adjectives in reverse order in normal circumstances. You would only say “the red big ball” if distinguishing it from a number of other big balls. It seems English speakers subconsciously follow a fairly strict set of rules which determine adjectival order. This post revisits my exploration of the subject as part of my degree in English Literature and Language at Manchester University.

Each of us in our tutor group was asked to present one seminar over the course of a term and this was the topic I chose to talk about. I was very nervous but my friend Martin, probably the brightest person I have ever known (he easily got a top first class degree), reassured me afterwards that it had been ok. He and I would spend hours discussing linguistics, my brain racing to keep up with him, a subject we both loved and were fascinated by. He became known to me and others as “Skylight Martin” because, in altered state at my 21st birthday party which my parents were good enough to host in our bookshop, my father found him halfway through the skylight, heading for the roof of the building. He was not the worst offender. Which is not to say I never behaved badly on such occasions, although my worst sin was usually falling asleep in inappropriate places. Another friend at the party, though, managed to lock himself in the basement toilet and nearly flood it, throw up on three separate floors and leave multiple cigarette burns in the carpets. He is a character of such charm that he was instantly forgiven.

My tutorials and seminars were strange at times. There were a lot of students who never spoke at all, whereas I was always piping up and asking questions. It amused and slightly unnerved me when I noticed some of them frantically scribbling down everything I said when I sometimes had no idea what I was talking about. The formidable Mrs Scragg (a Dickensian sounding name) would unceremoniously kick students out if she though they hadn’t read the texts under discussion. We had once been asked to read two Restoration comedies for a particular tutorial but I had run out of time and only managed one. She asked me to summarise both. I managed the first but for the second had to say that I couldn’t really remember much about it. To my huge relief, Mrs Scragg said, “Exactly. Why is it that Mr Rota cannot remember the second play?” Long silence. “It is because there is nothing memorable about it.” That may have been sheer luck, but I strongly suspect she gave me that break as a generally reasonably keen student who at least made contributions to the proceedings.

I think we always remember our great teachers. My prep school maths teacher, for example. He was perpetually extremely drunk but he did come up with aides-memoires like this, which I have never forgotten: GROF, GROB and CLOOSANOTO. It was about solving equations – get rid of fractions, get rid of brackets, collect letters on one side and numbers on the other. My first linguistics tutor asked us, the very first time we assembled, where he was from. Silence. “Scotland,” I ventured. “How do you know?” “It’s your accent.” “What about my accent?” I thought about it. “It’s the vowels.” It was a Eureka moment. He went on to explain that the words “shall” and “will” are used differently in England and Scotland. “Shall I open the window?” to which the answer in England is yes or no, as opposed to “Will I open the window?” – I have no idea, you might or you might not. In Scotland these are reversed. The manager at HART Wildlife Rescue is Scottish and I am forever picking up nuances and differences. Things “need done”, for example, rather than “need doing” or “need to be done”. Neither is superior to the other of course. Grammarians should, for the most part, be descriptive rather than prescriptive. No one can stop language evolving, not even the French academy, the Académie Française, founded in 1635, which, rather absurdly in my view, tried to ban the use of English loan words in French altogether. Here in West Berkshire I have noticed a few dialectal variations. There is a common tendency to use personal pronouns for inanimate objects (“The washing machine’s broken, but the repairman is coming to fix him.”) and the past participle of the verb “write” is “writ”. I am always at pains to point out that the (West) Berkshire version is absolutely not incorrect, it is just different.

My A-level subjects were English, French and German. No problems with the first two: French seemed to come fairly easily to me, and I love that mellifluous and frankly sexy language, but I really struggled with German, in spite of its being much more closely related to English than any of the Romance languages. I found the literature difficult, we were not well taught, and I really couldn’t stand Brecht. Goethe I barely understood at all. On the language side, there is so much inflection, and there are those three genders to contend with: “das Mädchen“, a girl, is neuter which seems odd. Then there is the tendency for German verbs to come at the end of a sentence (to simplify), which I found induced a certain impatience. Adverbial order is rigid: time, manner, place. This seemed unnecessarily onerous until I looked into the order of adjectives in English. On top of this, our principal German teacher had a heavy Welsh accent (an accent I really like), which means that what little German I retain probably still has a Welsh lilt to it.

I do like the amalgamation of words in German which can seem almost limitless. A result, suggested Sabine, a young German lady I met in an Amsterdam bar many years ago (it was all a bit Brief Encounter actually) of “miraculous German efficiency and precision”.

Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän, Danube steam ship company captain

Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung, real estate transaction permit competence transfer ordinance

Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, legal protection insurance companies

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, beef labelling regulation and delegation of supervision law

And my favourite, although obviously contrived:

Hottentottenpotentatentantenattentäter, the killer of the aunts of the potentates of Hottentot

German numbers are written as one word too, although I do not find that as strange as the French system which gets weird once you reach seventy (sixty + ten), then eighty (twenty x 4) and ninety (twenty x 4 + 10). I have always wondered why.

From the linguistics part of my degree, I fondly remember and still have a number of the standard textbooks (which, back then, we had to pay for – there were no internet versions of everything): Linguistic evolution with special reference to English by M.L. Samuels, An Old English Grammar by Randolph Quirk and C.L. Wrenn, A History of English by Barbara M.H. Strang, Old English Grammar by A. Campbell, A University Grammar of English by Randolph Quirk and Sidney Greenbaum, Transformational Syntax; a student’s guide to Chomsky’s Extended Standard Theory by Andrew Radford and Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader in prose and verse. I still find “Quirk and Greenbaum”, for example, highly evocative. Randolph Quirk was an interesting character. A Labour life peer, he served in Bomber Command in the Second World War, becoming Squadron Leader, and developed a keen interest in explosives. But he completed his MA in phonology and his thesis on syntax.

Going back to my notes for the seminar, there are authors whose names ring no bells: Corder, Hornby, Jesperson, Sopher, Muir, Whorf (B.L. Whorf of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis I was delighted to realise, see earlier post) and Goyvaerts, but I do quote Quirk and Greenbaum, and Strang. Suggestions for the rules which govern adjective order in English were by no means unanimous and of course the rules are not set in stone. Very broadly speaking, however, I seem to have reached some sort of a conclusion. From left to right we tend to go from the general to the specific.

“The old red photograph album” – the most ‘natural order.

“The red photograph old album” and “the photograph old red album” – almost nonsensical.

We say “the large green table” but if we are distinguishing one from a number of large tables, or one from a number of green tables, it can be the stress pattern not the word order which changes. Quirk makes the nice distinction between “his brilliant last book” and “his last brilliant book”, the latter suggesting there have been others in between which were less than brilliant.

Here then is stab at a rule, although it is not without its problems:

Determiner, General, Age, Shape / Length / Size, Colour, Participle, Provenance, Noun, Denomial, Head. Thus: “some intricate old interlocking Chinese designs” and “the extravagant London social life”. Strang places colour much earlier in the sequence.

Goyvaerts found that 1,098 of 1,150 examples tested followed his sequence: Determiner, Genitives, Quality, Size / Length / Shape and ‘Little’, Age, Colour, Nationality, Style, Gerund, Noun, Head. This seemed to me the most accurate and Goyvaerts pointed out that those in those examples which did not conform, word order could be changed without altering the meaning. No linguist claimed that their order was comprehensive or definitive and there are all manner of complications. What continues to intrigue me is that English speakers do follow a version of these rules most of the time without realising they are doing so, without ever having been taught them.