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"Big red" was the example chosen by the article, not me. And it seems a rather reasonable choice to me, it's French that's being weird here ;) But the noun pl
by jpatokal 12y ago
"Big red" was the example chosen by the article, not me. And it seems a rather reasonable choice to me, it's French that's being weird here ;)
But the noun placement is actually irrelevant here, as the point is that "grand" still precedes "rouge", and you'd never say "rouge avion grand" or even "avion rouge grand".
- stan_rogers 12y agoIt actually reinforces the rule, which is why linguistics requires a large number of languages for any sort of fundamental rules to emerge. Working from a single language, or from a very small set of languages that seem somehow to fit together if you apply enough force (like Latin and English), you wind up with those silly sentence diagrams I used to have to do in elementary school. (You know — the system that blew a fuse if you tried to use it on anything a human being would actually say in ordinary conversation.) In French it becomes easier both to see that "big" modifies the composite entity "red plane", and that there is a difference in kind between the two "adjectives" (which now looks like too broad a term to be really useful). It's not just a matter of word order (syntax), there's a semantic hierarchy in play as well.