What is the rule for adjective order?

Question

I remember being taught that the correct order of adjectives in English was something along the lines of "Opinion-Size-Age-Color-Material-Purpose."

However, it's been a long time and I'm pretty sure I've forgotten a few categories (I think there were eight or nine). Can anyone fill them in?

Answer 1

I am re­mind­ed of how J.R.R. Tol­kien’s moth­er once fa­mous­ly cor­rect­ed him at a very ear­ly age when he said ‘a green great drag­on’. She told him that it had to be ‘a great green drag­on’, but when he asked her why, she couldn’t an­swer, there­by start­ing him down the road of puz­zling over mat­ters of philology (linguistics) his whole life long.

This top­ic is one of con­tin­u­ing re­search. Sim­ply goog­ling for ‘ad­jec­tive or­der­ing re­stric­tions’ (AOR) or ‘ad­jec­tive hi­er­ar­chy’ can un­cov­er some fas­ci­nat­ing re­search in this area.

In her 2006 pa­per on “Ad­jec­tive Order­ing Re­stric­tions Re­vis­it­ed” on pp 309–407 of the Pro­ceed­ings of the 25ᵗʰ West Coast Con­fer­ence on For­mal Lin­guis­tics, Alex­an­dra Te­o­dor­es­cu writes:

Ad­jec­tive or­der­ing re­stric­tions (AOR) have been wide­ly dis­cussed, but they are still not very well un­der­stood. For ex­am­ple, in lan­guages like English pre­nom­i­nal ad­jec­tives are strict­ly or­dered.

…

For ex­am­ple, ad­jec­tives that de­note qual­i­ty have been ar­gued to pre­cede ad­jec­tives con­vey­ing size, which in turn pre­cede ad­jec­tives con­vey­ing shape, and so on, in all lan­guages (5). Sim­i­lar claims have been made for oth­er ad­jec­tive types, and the re­spec­tive or­der­ing re­stric­tions are giv­en in (6).

• (5) Qual­i­ty > Size > Shape > Color > Prov­e­nance [Sproat and Shih (1991)]

• (6) a. Posses­sive > Speak­er-ori­ent­ed > Sub­ject-ori­ent­ed >Man­ner/The­mat­ic [Cinque (1994)]

•        b. Value > Di­men­sion > Phys­i­cal prop­er­ty > Speed > Hu­man Propen­si­ty > Age > Color [Dixon (1982)]

See Teodor­es­cu’s bib­li­og­ra­phy to chase down re­lat­ed work. You should al­so look for pa­pers that cite hers (Google Schol­ar finds 26 such ci­ta­tions to her work), like Lu­cas Cham­pi­on’s 2006 pa­per on “A Game-The­o­ret­ic Ac­count of Ad­jec­tive Order­ing Restric­tions”, which starts off with the Tol­kien ex­am­ple.

Build­ing then on Cham­pi­on’s work is this English-lan­guage pa­per by An­to­nia An­drout­so­pou­lou, Ma­nuel Es­pañol-Eche­va­rría, and Phil­ippe Pré­vost en­ti­tled “On the Ac­qui­si­tion of the Prenom­i­nal Place­ment of Eval­u­a­tive Ad­jec­tives in L2 Spanish”, from the 10ᵗʰ His­pan­ic Lin­guis­tics Sym­po­si­um in 2008. This one is in­ter­est­ing be­cause it looks at how sec­ond-lan­guage learn­ers ac­quire an un­der­stand­ing of ad­jec­tive or­der­ing when learn­ing a new lan­guage:

In this pa­per, we fur­ther in­ves­ti­gate knowl­edge of ad­jec­ti­val or­der­ing re­stric­tions in for­eign lan­guage learn­ing, by fo­cus­ing on L2 ac­qui­si­tion of eval­u­a­tive ad­jec­tives (EAs) in Span­ish by French learn­ers.

The most re­cent pro­fes­sion­al pub­li­ca­tion I could find on this is­sue is Katy Mc­Kin­ney-Bock­’s 2010 pa­per on “Ad­jec­tive Class­es and Syn­tac­tic Or­der­ing Re­stric­tions”, in which she writes:

There is a lack of con­sen­sus in the lit­er­a­ture as to which clas­si­fi­ca­tion of ad­jec­tives is di­rect­ly rel­e­vant for the ob­served syn­tac­tic re­stric­tions on their or­der­ing. In this pa­per, I ar­gue that ad­jec­tives are di­vid­ed in­to four class­es of rel­e­vance for syn­tac­tic or­der­ing. I pro­pose that ad­jec­tive or­der­ing re­stric­tions (AOR) are the re­sult of ad­jec­ti­val con­stit­u­ents rais­ing or not rais­ing in the struc­ture as a con­se­quence of their com­plex­i­ty, rather than stip­u­lat­ing that se­man­tic prop­er­ties cor­re­late to syn­tac­tic heads.

and whose ex­tend­ed ab­stract reads:

I ar­gue there are four class­es of ad­jec­tives rel­e­vant to syn­tac­tic or­der­ing: pred­ica­tive/in­ter­sec­tive, pred­ica­tive/non-in­ter­sec­tive, non-pred­ica­tive, clas­si­fy­ing (Sven­on­i­us 2008, Al­ex­i­a­dou et al 2007), and pre­vi­ous pro­pos­als have not iden­ti­fied the rel­e­vant se­man­tic di­men­sions. Among the prop­er­ties of grad­abil­i­ty, mass/count, and in­ter­sec­tiv­i­ty, on­ly in­ter­sec­tiv­i­ty is syn­tac­ti­cal­ly rel­e­vant. The four class­es of ad­jec­tives are mo­ti­vat­ed by the dis­tri­bu­tion of or­dered/non-or­dered ad­jec­tives, scope ef­fects with cer­tain ad­jec­tive-pairs, PP-mod­i­fi­ca­tion, N-drop­ping and com­par­a­tives (Bouchard 2002, Hig­gin­both­am 1985, Ken­nedy 1999). DP struc­ture in­volves 1) merg­ing the clas­si­fy­ing ad­jec­tive with pro­nounced N, 2) merg­ing in­ter­sec­tive ad­jec­tives with N, 3) merg­ing non-in­ter­sec­tive ad­jec­tives with a silent copy of N.

Fi­nal­ly, if you’re look­ing for some­thing slight­ly less pro­fes­sion­al — or at least, less aca­dem­ic — then in this blog post­ing, the wri­ter pos­its an or­der­ing of:

• eval­u­a­tion
• size
• shape
• con­di­tion
• hu­man pro­pen­si­ty
• age
• col­or
• ori­gin
• ma­te­ri­al
• at­trib­u­tive noun

And sum­ma­rizes with:

If there’s def­i­nite­ly a mean­ing dif­fer­ence be­tween dif­fer­ent ad­jec­tive or­der­ings, let that de­ter­mine how you or­der them, and don’t use com­mas. If you can’t find a mean­ing dif­fer­ence, don’t go try­ing to force there to be one. In­stead, go by the ad­jec­tive-or­der­ing hi­er­ar­chy, and don’t use com­mas. If more than one ad­jec­tive has the same kind of mean­ing in the hi­er­ar­chy, then use com­mas, or ands or buts if the ad­jec­tives have con­tras­tive mean­ings.

There’s a lot more out there on this top­ic.

Answer 2

Michael Swan (Practical English Usage, Oxford University Press, 1997) writes:

"Unfortunately, the rules for adjective order are very complicated, and different grammars disagree about the details" p. 8

He does, however, go on to list some of the most important rules:

1. Adjectives of colour, origin, material and purpose usually go in that order.

   • Colour-origin-material-purpose-noun
   • red Spanish leather riding boots
   • A brown German beer mug
   • A Venetian glass flower vase
     
     

2. Other adjectives usually go before words of colour, origin, material and purpose. It is impossible to give exact rules, but adjectives of size, length and height often come first.

   • The round glass table (NOT the glass round table)
   • A big, modern brick house (NOT a modern, big brick house)
   • Long, flexible steel poles
   • A tall, ancient oak-tree
     
     

3. Adjectives which express judgements or attitudes usually come before all others. Examples are lovely, definite, pure, absolute, extreme, perfect, wonderful, silly.

   • A lovely, long, cool drink
   • Who's that silly fat man over there?
     
     

4. Numbers usually go before adjectives.

   • Six large eggs
   • The second big shock
     
     

   First, next and last most often go before one, two, three etc.

   • The first three days
   • My last two jobs."

pp. 8-9

He does not mention age, which would normally go after adjectives of size, length and height, but before colour, origin, material and purpose.

• A big old straw hat.
• A charming young university student.

Thus, a complete list could be:

(article) + number + judgement/attitude + size, length, height + age + colour + origin + material + purpose + noun

• a lovely long black leather coat
• a valuable Dutch Impressionist painting
• a rustic old stone holiday cottage

[Reference: BritishCouncil.org]

Answer 3

The order in which native English speakers generally use adjectives is called the 'Royal Order of Adjectives.'

The Royal Order of Adjectives is as follows:

1. Determiners (e.g. the, this)
2. Observations
3. Size
4. Shape
5. Age
6. Color
7. Nationality
8. Material
9. Type

For example, we would say:

Joyce Carol Oates is the [determiner] premier [observation] American [nationality] novel [type] writer.

You can read more about the royal order of adjectives here.

Answer 4

The European Union distinguishes between "Scottish Smoked Salmon" and "Smoked Scottish Salmon", the former indicating where the fish was smoked, and the latter indicating where the fish was caught/bred.

The rule seems to be that the locative adjective directly precedes the noun or verb it refers to.

Answer 5

Without going into details, the general principle seems to be that the more intrinsic or essential the quality of the object is, the closer to the noun the adjective should be, and the more accidental, the further away from it.

a beautiful, new, red, American, sports car

To help understand the idea of intrinsic/essential quality versus accidental quality, think of changing those qualities — think of Harold Chasen in Harold and Maude (a 1971 film by Hal Ashby) turning a Jaguar E-Type into a hearse.

The less essential the quality, the easier the transformation: beautiful is a matter of opinion, so you only have to ask another person to change the adjective, from new to as good as new, a little dent is enough, from red to any other colour, a little coat of paint, from American to Italian or Japanese, serious body modifications are needed, from sports car to hatchback, drastic modifications of body, engine, etc.

Answer 6

Page 974 of Garner's fourth edition reads

Two worst, not *worst two: the first, which is more logical than the second, has always predominated in print.

I do not why the first one more logical though. According to Google ngrams, we say the two best/worst but the first/next/last two.