
Why Do We Say “Big Red Barn,” But “Red Big Barn” Sounds Wrong? - tokenadult
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_good_word/2014/08/the_study_of_adjective_order_and_gsssacpm.single.html
======
digisth
There's a good post about this subject on the English SE:

[http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-
the-...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for-
adjective-order)

It goes into some other theories on AOR (Adjective Ordering Restrictions) and
I'd recommend it if you find the subject interesting. A quote from the top
answer, which I enjoyed:

"I am reminded of how J.R.R. Tolkien’s mother once famously corrected him at a
very early age when he said ‘a green great dragon’. She told him that it had
to be ‘a great green dragon’, but when he asked her why, she couldn’t answer,
thereby starting him down the road of puzzling over matters linguistic and
philologic his whole life long."

~~~
daturkel
Came here to post the same link. English adjective order is one of those
things that we're never taught as speakers of English as a first language, but
I'd imagine it's taught to those learning it as a second language.

~~~
jameshart
Another great example of a rule that exists in English that native speakers
generally follow without knowing, but is taught to learners of English as a
second language, is the rule of which adjectives form comparatives and
superlatives by suffixing '-er' and '-est', and which by prefixing 'more' and
'most'.

As a native English speaker I was never taught a rule that explains why I
would say _hotter_ or _wrigglier_ or _redder_ or _wildest_ or _shiniest_ , but
_more emphatic_ , _more open_ , _most excellent_ or _most orange_. I'd always
assumed adjective -er and -est suffixes were just irregular, with no pattern
to them at all.

But it turns out there's basically a simple rule - if it ends in '-y' or has
only one syllable, you suffix it; otherwise you use the 'more' or 'most' form.
It's remarkably solid as a rule, and even when I come up with a word that
sounds sort of right to my ear that doesn't follow the rule - like, for
example, I can kind of see 'wickedest' as being a valid form - it turns out
that if I think about it, it probably doesn't sound right after all, and I
would probably prefer 'most wicked'.

~~~
llllllllllll
It's good practice to check your intuition on things like this against a
searchable corpus. According to
[http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/](http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/), "most wicked" just
barely edges out "wickedest" in terms of frequency, 22 to 20.

An example that strongly goes against the rule:

 _simpler_ (3185) / _more simple_ (153)

 _simplest_ (2191) / _most simple_ (87)

~~~
sgustard
And a single-syllable counterexample: funner (24) / more fun (1860)

~~~
baddox
That analysis is probably confounded by the fact that "more fun" can be used
with "fun" as a noun, as in "We had more fun after you arrived."

~~~
sgustard
Good point. A google search also shows that since "fun" has only recently
migrated from a noun to an adjective, the -er/est forms are not yet accepted,
but will likely become standard over time.

------
tokenadult
I was a bit disappointed that this article focused on "pure" adjectives
without mentioning demonstrative and possessive modifiers. I learned about
adjective order differences between languages way back in the 1970s when I
took my first course in linguistics. These differences can be quite striking
between noncognate languages like English and Chinese. Both in English and in
Chinese, most grammatical relationships in sentences are communicated by word
order rather than by inflection of words. But the word order rules can differ,
particularly in the order of demonstrative versus possessive modifiers of
nouns (what we call "adjectives" in English). In English, it is very anomalous
to say * "my that book," as the standard word order would be "that book of
mine," but in Chinese it is expected to say, "我的那本書," which corresponds to the
anomalous word order in English. And so on for most phrases like those
contrasted between English and Chinese. One thing that gives native speakers
of Chinese an "accent" in English, besides phonology, is grammar differences
like that, and of course the same is true when a native speaker of English
speaks Chinese as a second language.

~~~
devonkim
I was thinking something similar but along a different line of thought using
English alone. Possessive modifiers behave differently than other "pure"
adjectives and whether it's anaphors.

1) Jim's red barn 1a) My red barn 2) Red Jim's barn (Not awkward like in the
headline example, but the meaning has changed completely) 2b) * Red my barn
(invalid, period. even if my -> mine - I can do this word order in Korean or
Japanese easily due to more explicit case marking)

We have to start using some syntactic movement to make the construct
syntactically acceptable and semantically natural and equivalent, but doing so
makes it possible to be free with word order:

3) Jim's barn that is red 3a) My barn that is red 4) Red barn that is Jim's
4a) Red barn that is mine (my -> mine) 5) Barn that is red and Jim's 5a) Barn
that is red and mine 6) Barn that is Jim's and red 6a) Barn that is mine and
red

The preferences aren't as clear-cut to me as in the headline clause, but we'd
rather keep the possessive separate from the pure adjective (3-4 > 5-6, higher
is more natural). Using only "pure" adjectives, it looks like the semantic
binding preference still sticks though:

7) Big red barn => 7a) Red barn that is big 7b) Big barn that is red 7c) Barn
that is red and big 7d) Barn that is big and red

Naturalness: 7b > 7a and 7d > 7c. And since 7d > 7b, we have 7d > 7c >= 7b 7a.
I'm thinking 7b > 7c but wasn't quite sure because both sound awkward and
comparing two mildly awkward clauses is probably not valid here.

But hopefully other native speakers roughly agree on the precedence of
awkwardness with me and understand why this article is just the tip of the
iceberg.

------
mratzloff
Interesting subject that I hadn't thought much about, but the cutesy writing
in the beginning almost stopped me from finishing. Fortunately I did finish,
as the meat of the article is farther down.

In summary, it turns out that we subconsciously order adjectives, most likely
by intrinsic quality.

That order is _" general opinion or quality ('exquisite,' 'terrible'),
specific opinion or quality ('friendly,' 'dusty'), size, shape, age, color,
origin, and material."_

------
sophacles
Im curious if anyone has looked at examples of writing that have short
sentences or phrases around the adjectives for example:

 _When I was a child we would visit grandma 's farm. There was a barn there I
loved to explore. It was big, it was red, it smelled of hay and had been
abandoned for years._

vs

 _The big red hay-scented abandoned barn._

And if the phrases follow the ordering rules as much as strings of adjectives.
Further, if there was a strong correlation, what would that say to us about
language and maybe even brain structure?

It would be interesting as well to know if that construct, which comes to mind
as a way to highlight intentionally out of order adjectives, is actually used
that way commonly or I'm just cherry picking random examples in my head.

------
zeteo
I doubt there's any set rule but it seems to depend on strength of
association. For example it's natural to say "red big toe" because "big toe"
is already a strong association. Another case where "big" has a stronger
association than color would be "white big brother".

On the other hand "red barn" has its own strong association [1].
Hypothetically if we lived in a community of farmers where "big barn" and
"small barn" were structures with very different purposes (but color didn't
matter much), it may be possible to conceive of "red big barn" instead.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barn)

~~~
robotresearcher
> "red big toe" because "big toe" is already a strong association.

That's because "big toe" is a compound noun that refers to one of your
innermost toes only. "big red toe" and "red big toe" mean different things.
The set of things they could refer to is different. In your barn example the
same thing is true.

~~~
zeteo
I see your point about the compound noun, but is there something in between
when we care more about size than color? I'm thinking of a phrase like "we all
went fishing and caught little fish, except for John who caught a black-
striped big fish". Does this sound natural to anyone else?

------
JshWright
Interesting that when Tom Scott did a (great) video on this topic back in
December, he used "Big Red" as his example as well.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M)

------
slipperyp
Apologies if this seems like an inappropriate fork, but the author uses a
convention in the introductory paragraph that I find jarring, at best, and I
wonder if anyone knows what it's called? It's this (emphasis added):

"...You're not wrong (though not entirely right, _because descriptivist
linguistics_ ): An intuitive code governs..."

Is there a name for this? It feels, to me, like an "abbrev" or something,
where the speaker wants to either convey cleverness or assume common
understanding with the audience. Maybe it could be called a "redditism" \-
that's where I think I normally see the form. Does it have a name? Just
curious...

~~~
allochthon
This is a recent usage, or even meme -- "because science," etc. She's no doubt
using "because" ironically. See:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/englis...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/english-
has-a-new-preposition-because-internet/281601/)

~~~
slipperyp
Many thanks - that's exactly the discussion I was looking for :)

------
NoMoreNicksLeft
Why does "large red barn" sound wrong, despite the supposed synonymic status
of "big" and "large"? Or, if it doesn't sound wrong, why does it tend to give
the impression of a very different meaning?

I don't think there are such things as pure synonyms, and I also don't believe
that "big" and "red" are distinct adjectives in the headline phrase. Rather,
they have formed a new "adjective phrase" that has new meaning beyond the sum
of the meanings of the individual words. This isn't so strange, the words
themselves have more meaning than the sum of the letters' meaning.

Thus if you say "red big barn", not only are you avoiding the meaning of the
more orthodox phrase, you're showing off that you're not describing it the way
others do. If I called a red balloon green, you'd point that out too and think
I spoke funny. Same thing here.

"Big red barn" is not just saying that the barn is big and also red. It
conveys the sense of a certain type of barn, in a certain part of the world,
in a certain era. Surely if we were to find some large cattle shack in the
Scottish highlands and paint it red, it would fail to become a "big red barn".
Or if we found some Sound-of-Music-esque farm building in Switzerland and we
diligently painted it, that too would fail to become a "big red barn".

The most amazing part of all this, to me, is how blind everyone is to it.

~~~
barkingcat
It's because inventive language use is dying.

Imagine if Dr. Seuss tried to write something today. The big book publishers
wouldn't even take a second look at his stuff.

~~~
sambeau
If you wander around the children's department of a book shop (especially here
in the UK) you would soon realise what a ridiculous statement that is.

I was in Waterston's children's department (UK bookseller chain) this weekend
and found myself amazed at the sheer diversity of kids books. There was a
multitude of amazing kids titles full of bonkers ideas and fascinating fun
prose (a lot of it made up of made up words and interesting sounds). There
were also weird and wonderful illustrations to join them.

Myself and my kids browsed and laughed and (in one case - 'Goodbye Mog' \-
cried (although the language of the book is traditional, the subject matter -
death - was unusual for a kids book)). lemony Snicker is also a case of
inventive ideas rather than inventive language. But we picked up all sorts of
weird books with strange language and big colourful pictures.

I came back impressed thinking that the kids book market was in a healthy
imaginative state and wishing I went to 'rea'l book shops more often — you
don't get a real sense of what is out there from an online bookstore. I'd
forgotten how wonderful browsing was.

~~~
TillE
> you don't get a real sense of what is out there from an online bookstore.
> I'd forgotten how wonderful browsing was.

Yeah, I've found great stuff just browsing near other category-sorted books in
a university library. It's so disappointing that nothing similar exists
online, either for fiction or nonfiction.

I'd love to see someone build a properly "curated" virtual bookstore with a
great interface. Sell me things I don't yet know I want. Give me weird niches
like occult bookstores as well. This can all exist online, but nobody has
really done it.

------
dfxm12
Is "big red" the best example to use? We might be primed to thinking "big red"
is correct because I've seen/read/heard it in other contexts:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_(gum)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_\(gum\))

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_(drink)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_\(drink\))

~~~
pixelcort
Hmm, but also "small green frog" vs "green small frog".

~~~
dsuth
It works in that context too. It would have to be a Small Frog (proper noun)
to make sense as "green Small frog".

What an interesting and unexpected thing to find on HN :D

------
wyager
That's interesting. I was reading about Lojban the other day, and I was
thinking to myself that the placement of "sumti" around a given "selbri" was
complicated to remember. For example, the word "vecnu" (meaning "sell" in
English) is used like this:

    
    
       x1 x2 vecnu x3
    

where x1 is the seller, x2 is the good being sold, and x3 is the buyer.

But I guess now that I think about it, English is just as full of arbitrary
ordering rules, even though we have directional indicators like "x1 sells x2
_to_ x3".

~~~
gioele
> even though we have directional indicators like "x1 sells x2 to x3".

indicators that are not always used or needed: "she sold it him".

~~~
dragonwriter
> indicators that are not always used or needed: "she sold it him".

I've never seen that kind of construction used except by very young children
or non-native English speakers coming from languages where the role of the
prepositions would instead be served by inflecting the noun or pronoun. I
don't think its an example of a case where those things aren't required in
English, insofar as "required" means anything in a natural language.

~~~
delluminatus
Sure you have. Here's an easier example:

"I told him that." instead of "I told that to him."

~~~
dragonwriter
> Sure you have.

I'd rather you not try to speak for my experience, since clearly you have no
basis for doing so. In any case, you are wrong, possibly because you are
confusing two different constructions for the same construction.

> Here's an easier example: "I told him that." instead of "I told that to
> him."

That's _not_ the same construction as "She sold it him" in place of "She sold
it to him"; its a different construction in which _changes to word order_
conveys the same relationship that is conveyed by prepositions in the form
with preopositions. The same construction would be "I told that him".

There's a difference between being able to simply drop the prepositions and
with there being an alternative mechanism of using word order to replace the
prepositions.

~~~
thaumasiotes
You're just moving the goalposts here. Look upthread and you'll see yourself
saying that we're talking about examples "where those things [directional
indicators like the preposition _to_ ] aren't required in English". You've
already picked up two comments pointing out that gioele made an obvious
mistake when referencing a rule we're all familiar with. Since the only claim
was that directional prepositions "are not always used or needed" even when
they're permitted, the details of how you might avoid using them are
completely irrelevant -- it's sufficient that it's possible to omit them.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Look upthread and you'll see yourself saying that we're talking about
> examples "where those things [directional indicators like the preposition
> to] aren't required in English".

And you'll see in the same post that I quoted that that I criticized not the
concept that the indicators were not required, but the particular _example_
given as being a poor example as it was not an example of a construction that
was idiomatic English in current use by native speakers.

"I don't think its an example of a case where those things aren't required in
English" in reference to a particular construction is not a claim that there
are not _other_ constructions which would be a valid example.

------
mcovey
In French some adjectives come after the noun, some come before, and even
though my French is not that great, I know enough for some reason to have that
gut feeling that "le grand rouge <noun>" sounds weird, and it should be "le
grand <noun> rouge". Interesting how even with a second language these habits
become ingrained.

------
rthomas6
What if it has something to do with the adjectives that are most
important/specific? Suppose I were categorizing my big barns by color, but not
my little barns (Nobody cares about the little barns). My red big barn is
pretty standard, but my green big barn is hard to see because it's
camouflaged.

~~~
mratzloff
Again, this is covered by the article. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8194338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8194338).

------
goldfeld
I can see it going the other way around depending on the emphasis of the
narrative. For example, if I were to say "Oh, it was a big, red barn", that
sounds wrong, because "red" isn't something you'd usually emphasize. Whereas
"It was a red, big barn!" sounds good.

------
tspiteri
Red Big Barn does not always sound wrong to me. If there are ten big barns and
ten small barns, and one of the big barns is red, I would call it the red big
barn, not the big red barn. But if there is just one isolated barn, and it is
red and big, then red big barn does sound weird to me.

~~~
sabbatic13
That was covered in the article. Disrupting the default order allows you to
put emphasis on certain words, in your case, you'd want the color adjective to
stand out. The other option, which I don't think the article covered, would be
to change the rhythm and speed of the phrase slightly and put an audible
emphasis on red.

~~~
barkingcat
Yes rhythm and speed of reading matters too.

A writer and poet also has that in their toolbox.

~~~
jfarmer
If you're interested in the linguistic term, it's "prosody."

------
joelberman
Not the same, but in the same vein this blog caught my attention.
[http://borealexpat.blogspot.com/2014/08/deconstructing-
finni...](http://borealexpat.blogspot.com/2014/08/deconstructing-finnish.html)

Complex rules that just seem natural.

------
stevenbedrick
In case anybody's interested in an application of machine learning to this
problem area:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5558287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5558287)

------
beardyw
“varnished blistered wood” describes wood which is blistered, if such a thing
can happen, whereas “blistered varnished wood” says the varnish is blistered
which makes more sense. Just a poor example I think.

~~~
IneffablePigeon
Your example is an exception to the rule, though. Usually, two adjectives
don't modify each other.

In fact, I find your second example a bit ambiguous because of that very fact
-- it could mean that the varnish is blistered _or_ that the wood is
blistered. The first seems to make more sense in terms of semantics, and the
second seems to make more sense in terms of grammar.

------
razzaj
while "bad little dog" sounds better than "little bad dog", "big bad dog"
sounds better than "bad big dog". I wonder if that means that we might be
subconsciously interpreting strings from right to left, and in that sense:
Little(bad(dog)) would represent less our intended meaning than
bad(little(dog)). Whereas Big(bad(dog)) would intuitively enhance our meaning
when compared to bad(big(dog)).

------
bramvanleur
The font property in CSS requires me to say "italic large serif" instead of
"large italic serif" which sounds wrong too.

Now I know why.

------
JoshTheGeek
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M](https://youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M)

------
jpswade
The English language is a nonsense.

For example, “Black box”:

In French this would be called a “boîte noire” or literally a “box black”.
This seems more logical as first you identify that it is a box you are looking
for, secondly that it is black.

~~~
lelag
It's a strange choice to choose the french language as a example over this
matter when it's even worse.

Adjectives can be placed in front or after a word and you also have to guess
instinctively which is right.

Ex :

"Un grand homme" (a great man)

"Un homme grand" (a tall man)

Both are valid but don't mean the same thing.

Source : I'm french.

~~~
jpswade
My example used literal translations, so for example:

[https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20great%20man](https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20great%20man)
a great man => un grand homme

[https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20tall%20man](https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20tall%20man)
a tall man => un grand homme

In both of these examples, the ordering is the same as English.

So yes by that logic, you're right, French is equal to or worse than English.

