Comprehension of prenominal adjective orders

Abstract

In two experiments, phrases describing a referent object contained two prenominal adjectives in either normal or inverted order. The time to identify the position of the referent in a display was a function of both the adjective order and the nonreferent context. If the referent appeared with a nonreferent differing from it only in size or number. the normal order of adjectives facilitated responding. However, if the referent appeared with a nonreferent differing from it only in color, the inverted order of adjectives resulted in faster identification times. These results support a pragmatic communication rule that, when the more discriminating adjectives are ordered earlier in aseries. comprehension is facilitated.

A multifactorial corpus analysis of adjective order in English

“…In several studies, it has been argued that AO is solely "determined by the pragmatic demands of the communication situation" (Danks & Glucksberg 1971: 66;cf. also Danks & Schwenk 1972, 1974, i.e. by a pragmatic communication rule which states that adjectives are primarily ordered according to the adjectives' discriminative potential: more discriminating adjectives precede less discriminating ones.…”

Learning speaker-specific linguistic ‘style’ is mediated by deviance from common language use

“…One could argue that the learning observed in the current study is not simply ‘stylistic’ because it is possible that – in real-life referential communication – differences in adjective ordering entail different meanings (Danks & Glucksberg, 1971; Danks & Schwenk, 1972, 1974; Scontras, 2023; Whorf, 1945). As discussed in the introduction section, this is unlikely in the context of the current study.…”

“…Therefore, the weak adjective ordering preferences in Hebrew could allow us to examine stylistic non-crucial meaning preferences. Some research on English suggests that adjective ordering variation is linked to meaning inference (Danks & Glucksberg, 1971;Danks & Schwenk, 1972, 1974Scontras, 2023;Whorf, 1945). Specifically, it has been shown that deviation from the common adjective order in English, by placing a certain adjective earlier in the sequence than it usually is, could implicate that some feature of the object is especially worth emphasizing (Martin, 1970;Martin & Ferb, 1973).…”