Long-standing issues in adjective order and corpus evidence for a multifactorial approach

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the issue of adjective order and show that different approaches vary in their answers to the question of how fine-grained the semantic categories determining adjective order are. We report on a corpus study that we conducted and that illustrates that a clear answer to the question of what general factors exactly determine adjective order is elusive, given the multifactorial nature of the problem. We then present the individual contributions to this special issue, and how they attempt to add new observations from Germanic languages to the general issues revolving around the topic of adjective order.1 General issues in the study of adjective orderThe issue of adjective order has a long history in linguistics. As early as in 1933, Bloomfield remarked on the robust pattern of size adjectives usually preceding color adjectives (a small black dog vs. a black small dog). Following these early notes, many researchers in linguistic theory investigated adjective order in the form of semantic hierarchies (Dixon 1982;Bache and Davidsen-Nielsen 1997). In addition, early psychological studies explored how frequent co-occurrence between an adjective and a noun may contribute to them becoming fixed expressions, with fixed orders (see Martin 1969 et seq.). Other cognitive studies elaborate on the notion of 'apparentness', where an adjective denoting a cognitively apparent quality requires fewer computations in order to be processed than an adjective

Overspecification and incremental referential processing: An eye-tracking study.

“…Unlike the ordering of color and pattern, the relative ordering of other attributes has been shown to be semantically or syntactically restricted (e.g., Culbertson et al, 2020; Dixon, 1982; Hetzron, 1978; Quirk et al, 1985; Scontras et al, 2017, 2019; Scott, 2002; Trotzke & Wittenberg, 2019; Whorf, 1945). Thus, one may wonder to what extent the current findings depend on the fact that the ordering of color and pattern attributes can be varied more freely than the ordering of, for example, size and color.…”

Universal linguistic hierarchies are not innately wired. Evidence from multiple adjectives

“…A number of recent works follow standard cartographic assumptions in accepting the adjective hierarchy to be innate and universal (Sheehan, 2017; Huang, 2017), in acknowledging it as one of the possible explanations on the topic of adjective ordering (Payne, 2018; Trotzke & Wittenberg, 2019), or in developing proposals that put forth less fine-grained hierarchies that are, however, quite similar to those explored in cartography (Pereltsvaig & Kagan, 2018). In sum, it has been recently argued that it is still unclear which theory is the most adequate to explain the attested data (Trotzke & Wittenberg, 2019), while several attempts to experimentally verify the basic claims of cartography in relation to adjective ordering are currently in progress (Mišmaš, Marušič & Žaucer, 2018; Plesničar, 2018; Dolenc, 2018). Fitting the purposes of the third group of studies, the present work aims to add to the several recent works that have produced results that call the cartographic claims into question (e.g., Scontras, Degen & Goodman, 2017; Kotowski & Härtl, 2019).…”

A Corpus Investigation of the Ordering of Selected Attributive Adjectives in Slovenian

“…And finally, although much attention has recently been paid to testing adjective order constraints with the corpus approach, no corpus study has really directly examined the predictions of the cartographic model, even though the cartographic model is currentlydominant in the domain of adjective order research, and Scott's (2002) proposal, moreover, is one of the most fine-grained of all offered so far. Generally, corpus studies test the predictions of Scott's cartographic model either indirectly, against other semantic classifications, or within a limited set of semantic categories and nouns (Wulff 2003, Truswell 2009, Scontraset al 2017, Kotowski and Hartl 2019, Trotzke and Wittenberg 2019.…”

“…( 7) SIZE>LENGTH>HEIGHT>SPEED>DEPTH>WIDTH>WEIGHT> TEMPERATURE>WETNESS>AGE>SHAPE> COLOR>MATERIAL> NP As a currently highly prominent model in the domain of complex NP research, the cartographic model has attracted a lot of criticism, ranging from the problem of innateness, origin, and functional projection proliferation to the problem of rigidity (e.g., Svenonius 2008, Truswell 2009, Scontras et al 2017, Leivada and Westergaard 2019, Larson 2021. Given the conclusions based on large databases (cases of actual use of multiple adjective strings), the concerns of corpus studies focusing on the rigidity problem, or the so-called empirical undergeneration problem, seem particularly relevant (Wulff 2003, Truswell 2009, Kotowski and Hartl 2019, Trotzke and Wittenberg 2019. Since a rigid order is assumed as a direct output of adjectival functional hierarchy within the cartographic model, the data that do not attest to restrictions in ordering among the proposed semantic categories could be problematic for this strictly syntactic approach.…”