Re:Avoiding the Adjective Fallacy
by thaumasiotes on Tuesday September 29, 2015 @03:17PM
(#10298783)
This is actually sort of called out in the comments on the post, but I think it bears saying again in my own way.
It's deeply disingenuous to compare effortless biologically-determined learning to effortful general learning and think you can apply lessons from one to the other. Even in the example the OP picked, there's a reason that the learners drill the adjective order table, and it's because without the drill they will never learn it at all. Learning a language as a small child is a different process than learning the same language as a late teen or adult, and the results are very different. (Even so, I wouldn't bother instructing people in adjective order... if they do never learn it, it's no big loss.)
On a different, more technical note, OP doesn't quite understand what's going on in the example either. "Vietnamese spicy food" is perfectly standard English; the ordering there is determined by context. "Vietnamese spicy food" is a subset of spicy food, and will be used whenever it's being contrasted with other spicy food, whereas spicy Vietnamese food is a subset of Vietnamese food, and will be used whenever a contrast is drawn between spicy Vietnamese food and other Vietnamese food. (It's correct, however, that in the zero-context case, "spicy Vietnamese food" is preferred. In my analysis, that's more because people are likely to reify the concept of "Vietnamese food", which makes the phrase structure ("spicy" [adj] "Vietnamese food" [noun]) rather than ("spicy" [adj] "Vietnamese" [adj] "food" [noun]).)
It's deeply disingenuous to compare effortless biologically-determined learning to effortful general learning and think you can apply lessons from one to the other. Even in the example the OP picked, there's a reason that the learners drill the adjective order table, and it's because without the drill they will never learn it at all. Learning a language as a small child is a different process than learning the same language as a late teen or adult, and the results are very different. (Even so, I wouldn't bother instructing people in adjective order... if they do never learn it, it's no big loss.)
On a different, more technical note, OP doesn't quite understand what's going on in the example either. "Vietnamese spicy food" is perfectly standard English; the ordering there is determined by context. "Vietnamese spicy food" is a subset of spicy food, and will be used whenever it's being contrasted with other spicy food, whereas spicy Vietnamese food is a subset of Vietnamese food, and will be used whenever a contrast is drawn between spicy Vietnamese food and other Vietnamese food. (It's correct, however, that in the zero-context case, "spicy Vietnamese food" is preferred. In my analysis, that's more because people are likely to reify the concept of "Vietnamese food", which makes the phrase structure ("spicy" [adj] "Vietnamese food" [noun]) rather than ("spicy" [adj] "Vietnamese" [adj] "food" [noun]).)