The point being that, if you hear someone say ‘a green great dragon’, you understand the speaker to be referring to a kind of dragon called a ‘great dragon’. Be

The point being that, if you hear someone say ‘a green great dragon’, you understand the speaker to be referring to a kind of dragon called a ‘great dragon’. Because, to make sense in that order, ‘great’ can’t be merely a reference to the speaker’s opinion about the dragon (‘it’s grrrreat!’) or the size of it (‘great big enormous’), but instead a qualifier for a kind of dragon. That you can infer that ‘great’ connotes something different because of its position in the adjective sequence is an argument in favor of the idea that the sequencing is semantically meaningful, not against it.