4 ms·

Not to sincerely defend the claim that "the" "is" an adjective, but rather to dispute the general notion that grammar is "real": Here are some adjectives that f

• pests 11y ago
  Wait, what exactly is wrong about the last one? It sounds odd, but not so incorrect, to me.
  • peterfirefly 11y ago
    It is perfectly grammatical if "brick" is taken to be a verb. Edit: this is in reference to "brick the barn". Grammatical if nonsensical. "Brick ancient barn" is of course weird and wrong unless you really want to emphasize that this is a brick ancient barn and not a wooden ancient barn like all the other ancient barns. The normal adjective order can be deviated from for emphasis. My point was that that didn't work when "the" was one of the "adjectives". (I've been trying to fall asleep for hours so I make mistakes left and right -- I apologize for not being clear about the word list I referred to.)
    • Cushman 11y ago
      Not to keep you up, but what's even cooler is that the degree to which you can deviate depends on the adjective's class, too. While I can sorta see "brick ancient barn" working, albeit with such heavy emphasis on "brick" that "ancient barn" turns into a bit of a compound, "grain lone silo" or "fish dry pond" don't sound grammatical to me at all. Maybe also because "grain silo" and "fish pond" are almost-notquite compounds?
      • peterfirefly 11y ago
        That ship has sailed. It's 06:40 and the sun has been pouring through my windows for more than an hour :/ The part of my body that has synched up with the daylight refuses to listen to the part that needs sleep. -- "Grain silo" and "fish pond" are exactly-precisely compound nouns. It's just that English refuses to accept that it's a Germanic language and instead puts on airs. Honest languages would of course never dream of inserting pretentious spaces between the constituent parts. I actually thought of "stone chimney" as a compound noun instead of adjective + noun when I wrote it, precisely because I wanted to mock that and really hammer home the point. Unfortunately, the two look the same in English (but not in Danish) -- and I was tired -- so I didn't catch it and replace it with a better example.
        • thaumasiotes 11y ago
          English draws this distinction for gold, with gold (n) and golden (adj).
          • peterfirefly 11y ago
            I actually meant: written in one word (stonechimney, a compound noun) or not (stone chimney, not a compound noun).
        • Cushman 11y ago
          > "Grain silo" and "fish pond" are exactly-precisely compound nouns. Eeeh, not exactly in English. English does make some distinction between fully compounded words and noun phrases, especially in rules of production. In a newer phrase like "wind farm", you can swap in more or less any noun you like, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense: "mud farm", "rock farm", "hair farm"... there's some rule like "substance + farm = a farm that produces that substance". With a word like "bedroom", you can get "bathroom", but not so much "deskroom"; there's no general rule like "furniture + room = room where that furniture is found". The space (in cases where it's pronounced) is kinda your hint there. Anyway... I still don't believe in grammar, but y'all have mounted a spirited defense of the traditional analysis. I'm sorry I tried to say everything's an adjective :)
  • henrikschroder 11y ago
    http://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/ http://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectiv... Most people would be comfortable saying "ancient grey brick barn".
• lnanek2 11y ago
  Actually there's an order you are supposed to apply things like that. Maybe someone came up with it after the fact, but there is a determinative way to make a list of adjectives sound right.
• tokipin 11y ago
  I wager it's consensus that determines what sequence of words is considered "proper" or not. Personally I have very generous criteria for what a reasonable sentence is. Thought experiment: Reversed words of sequence the with but us for valid as count would that anything be to sentence valid a define. When we're young we absorb language the way we experience it, in an informal and cultural way. I think in any attempt to categorize aspects of language this basic character has to be respected (which it is in linguistics, being fundamental to it, but which it isn't in e.g. English canon). Accepting that one's language is actually a messy evolution-convolution of ancient languages is easier for some than others. :D
• belovedeagle 11y ago
  The first two (worstest/most least, so smallest) are easily classified as wrong because "-est", "most", and "so" only apply to adjectives of positive degree rather than comparative or superlative. So to deny that grammar is "real" using these examples is to attack a strawman.
  • Cushman 11y ago
    Oh, I get what you're saying-- so "the" must be a superlative adjective, right? Makes sense really, as it's the "most specific" article.
    • belovedeagle 11y ago
      ... no, quite the opposite. Since grammar has no reason to prefer large classification sets (generalization) to small (uniqueness), unlike descriptive linguistics, I'm perfectly happy to say that grammatically "the" is an article and leave it at that.
• plorkyeran 11y ago
  "brick grey ancient barn" is grammatically correct if you assume "brick grey" is a color, but of course that's probably not what it's supposed to mean.
  • peterfirefly 11y ago
    Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
  • Cushman 11y ago
    Indeed! Although I'd argue that probably is what it's supposed to mean. A "leather horse saddle" and a "horse leather saddle" are very different things, and no native English speaker would mix them up. You know which they mean.
    • falsedan 11y ago
      What's your point?
      • jschwartzi 11y ago
        That one is for horses, and the other is from horses.
        • falsedan 11y ago
          As any fule kno
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
• dsfas 11y ago
  "Worstest" seems to be a morphological problem. "Most least" could be permissible, if somewhat exotic sounding, I think, if "least" is read with its adjectival meaning―"used in names of very small animals and plants, e.g., least shrew"―so eg. most least shrew. "So smallest" doesn't work with any other superlative ("most reddest") that I can imagine off the top of my head. And "brick ancient barn" is an unusual order but not ungrammatical, though it is interesting. (It sounds more like listing adjectives, ie. I'd read a larger pause after "brick" and stress on "ancient", than the other order. MATERIAL AGE NOUN seems to read awkwardly.)
  • Cushman 11y ago
    If "brick ancient barn" is too plausible for you to get the full effect, try something with more diverse adjectives like "beef tasty stew" or "laptop lost bag".
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • thaumasiotes 11y ago
      You really do like fake examples. Can you point to a syntactician making the argument that the "beef" of "beef stew", or the "laptop" of "laptop bag", is an adjective? In any context I'm familiar with, that person would be laughed out of the room.
      • Cushman 11y ago
        Fair point, apart from the invective. How do you feel about "hiking worn boots" or "mixed-breed adorable puppy"?
        • thaumasiotes 11y ago
          "Hiking boots" has the same problem -- the boots aren't themselves hiking, they're boots for use in hiking. That's another noun-noun compound. "Mixed-breed puppy" is, to me, not such a clear case ("breed" is clearly originally a noun, but maybe this use is common enough to have converted). But you don't need to use spurious examples -- in another comment, you provided a very genuine one: "red" and "wooden" are both clearly adjectives, and their ordering cannot vary. This is a well-known example of a somewhat-but-not-entirely mysterious phenomenon in linguistics. Here's a nice recent writeup of what I think is a related phenomenon: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/cutthroat-compounds-in-english-morphology/ https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/cutthroat-compoun... . This one consists of the observation that words like "kickass" and "pickpocket" are suppressed (not illegal, but suppressed) in English because they conflict with our tendency toward right-headedness (that is, in any English compound, the "essence" of the compound should be found at the right end). Instead, we incline more to compounds like "bank robber" or "nose-thumbing" ("engage in a bit of nose-thumbing"). Someone else in this thread already mentioned that they see adjective ordering as a question of which adjectives are more essential to the whole. My problem with your comments here is that you're making arguments based on obviously spurious tests unrelated to the claims you then try to follow (um, lead) with. It's analogous to saying "We need to stop celebrating Thanksgiving by eating turkey. Turkey perpetrated the Armenian genocide, genocide is bad and should be stopped, QED". Stick to honest examples, and you'll find the problems you're talking about are rather muted. Don't let your feeling that the problems are large, and you therefore need extremely malformed examples, lead you into choosing examples that are extremely malformed because they exhibit a completely different problem.
• philsnow 11y ago
  > Outside the wooden red house was a brick grey ancient barn. native speakers of english will find that "red wooden house" is favored over "wooden red house", the same way the "big red dog" is favored over "red big dog". There's an ordering to adjectives that has something to do with how important the adjective is to the identity or distinctiveness of the modified object.