A developmental study of the pragmatic communication rule for prenominal adjective ordering*

Abstract

-, and eighth-grade children and college u ndergraduates indicated preference for either normal or inverted orders 01' prenominal adjectives (for example, the large red car or the red large car. respectively) to describe a pictorial referent. Preference for the normal order 01' adjectives first appeared with the fourth graders. When communication context was varied by presenting a nonreferent that required a coloradjective for discrimination from the referent, college students increased their preference for the inverted order. This separation 01' the acquisition 01' a linguistic rule from its utilization in cornrnunication was discussed.Prenominal adjectives are ordered according to some rule or convention. For exarnple, the phrase the Zarge red car is generally preferred to the phrase the red Zarge car. Recently. there have been a number 01' laboratory demonstrations that adjective order preferences in English do exist and that the ordering is not random (Danks & Glucksberg. 1971; Martin. 1969b). Additionally. Martin and Molfese (1971) found that children as young as 9 years 01' age preferred basically the same prenominal ordering 01' adjectives as did adults. Schefflin (1971) found that 5-. 6-, and 7-year-old children produced noun phrases with the adjectives normally ordered even after hearing similar phrases with the orders permuted to inc1ude all possible orders. Unusual adjective ordering occurred in only 127c 01' the phrases in which multiple adjectives were used to describe an object. There is also sorne evidence that children as young as 3 and 4 years exhibit specific adjective order preferences (Bever. 1970: Martin & Molfese. 1972. although it is not clear that their preferences are precisely the sarne as those exhibited by older children and adults.While both children and adults exhibit preferences for certain orderings 01' prenorninal adjectives, the basis for these preferences is not easily specified. Schefflin (1971 ) has noted that English grammar books written for teachers 01' native English speakers typically ignore the problem 01' adjective ordering. Martin (1969a. b) has commented on the failure 01' efforts to account for adjective ordering with syntactic rules. The search for a semantic rule to account for the phenomenon 01' adjective ordering has met with some success. Ratings 01'