Re:What is the rule for adjective order?
by ColinWright on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @10:54AM
(#5558431)
Just as a data point, to me, it doesn't matter which of those adjectives you think is more important, I think "the big red building" sounds much more natural than "the red big building." The latter sounds flat-out wrong to me.
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Re:What is the rule for adjective order?
by itsybitsycoder on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @02:10PM
(#5559764)
What about:
A: What building do I need to go to? B: The big one. A: Which big one? I see a red one and a green one. B: The red big building.
Re:What is the rule for adjective order?
by ColinWright on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @02:24PM
(#5559855)
I wouldn't say that. I've just tried saying out loud to a friend, and they also said it was weird. I would definitely say "The big red building," or even leave out "big" entirely - it's already been specified.
It's worth knowing that I'm a pure mathematician, and I frequently come out with utterances that others find odd, purely on logical grounds. It's plausible that there are circumstances in which I would violate these rules/guidelines/suggestions/baseless musings/whatever.
That's not one of them.
Why do we privilege individual judgements that something seems "weird," particularly when it would be perfectly understood?
It's as if linguistics is often modeling syntactic rules which reflect something other than natural communication as it actually occurs.