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Lexical Semantics of Adjectives - CiteSeerX

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18<br />

Apparently, (29) leaves out relative adjectives because it accounts only for the qualitative ones in<br />

(28), but it does account for such long--and rare--sequences as (30) (cf. Frawley 1992: 482, ex.<br />

42a):<br />

(30) five good long smooth old brown [wooden] tables<br />

Quirk and Greenbaum (1973) and Quirk et al. (1985: 437) believe that the more inherent the adjective<br />

meaning the closer the adjective’s position to the noun. Hoepelman (1983) attempts to deal<br />

with the adjective order on formal-logical grounds. Vendler (1968) relies, <strong>of</strong> course, on the order<br />

<strong>of</strong> transformations deriving the nominal phrase for the order <strong>of</strong> adjectives (121-134); and Katz<br />

(1972: 766) goes even further than Vendler, saying, somewhat cryptically, that: “[i]t is clear on other<br />

grounds that the ordering <strong>of</strong> adjectives is a semantically irrelevant syntactic feature... [because]<br />

the only syntactic properties that are semantically relevant are those which determine the grammatical<br />

relations within a sentence.”<br />

In a sense, Seiler (1978), who attempts to explain the adjective order in terms <strong>of</strong> the scope <strong>of</strong> the<br />

modifiers in their relation to the domain they modify, synthesizes both the syntactic considerations<br />

<strong>of</strong> Vendler and Katz and the formal-logic motivation <strong>of</strong> Hoepelman. Hetzron (1978), on the other<br />

hand, seems closer to Quirk and Greenbaum (1973) and Quirk et al. (1985) and Bache (1978). The<br />

latter tries to account for the order <strong>of</strong> adjectives in terms <strong>of</strong> the subjectivity and objectivity <strong>of</strong> the<br />

meanings expressed by them: evaluative adjectives, which are the most subjective, take a more remote<br />

place than such objective meanings as size or color.<br />

Frawley (1992: 483-486) finds evidence that the hypotheses proposed for English do not really<br />

hold well for other languages. There are additional problems in other languages as well. Thus,<br />

French, for which the postposition <strong>of</strong> the adjective is usual and unmarked, can use adjectives prepositively<br />

as well, and this marked word order may change the meaning <strong>of</strong> the transposed adjective,<br />

formalize the style, or add an evaluative nuance (cf. Bally 1944: 232, 234). Whaley (1995) provides<br />

similar observations about the pre- and postnominal positions <strong>of</strong> the adjective in Hellenistic<br />

Greek. The appositional use <strong>of</strong> adjectives, possible in English and many other languages, <strong>of</strong>ten<br />

with oblique modifiers to the adjective, is yet another word-order aspect <strong>of</strong> its use (Giatigny 1966,<br />

Forsgren 1993, Bernstein 1995).<br />

While we have discussed all the principal approaches to the issue <strong>of</strong> adjective order that are <strong>of</strong><br />

some significance to us, there is a vast literature on the subject. Most <strong>of</strong> it does not question the<br />

importance <strong>of</strong> the issue and, thus, <strong>of</strong>ten leaves it unclear what exactly can be gained by expanding<br />

our knowledge <strong>of</strong> it at a seemingly significant expense--see Bache 1978, Danks and Gluckberg<br />

1971, Danks and Schwenk 1972, Ferris 1993, Goyvaerts 1968, Lord 1970, Martin 1969a,b, and<br />

1970, Ney 1981, Sproat and Shih 1988, Waugh 1976. Besides Quirk et al (1985), such grammar<br />

compendiums as Dirven (1989: Chapter III) and Halliday (1985: Chapter 6) as well as numerous<br />

others touch on adjective order as well.<br />

1.8 Qualitative (Gradable) <strong>Adjectives</strong>: Degrees <strong>of</strong> Comparison, Scales<br />

As the example <strong>of</strong> Dixon’s position on adjective order in (29) illustrates, scholars <strong>of</strong>ten ignore relative<br />

adjectives in their writings on the category (cf. Lewis 1972: 10), especially in English, where<br />

relative adjectives are so few. In general, much more has been written, in and on any language,<br />

about qualitative (gradable, scalar, predicating) adjectives per se. Two issues definitely stand out

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