Friday, April 5, 2013

Are there any exceptions to the rule of adjective order?




What is the rule for adjective order? addresses the rule but does not state if there are any exceptions in common use.



http://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary goes further and claims, "Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech."



Is it really inviolable?


Answer



Yes; in some cases, the "improper" ordering is more popular than the "proper" one. Occasionally, there's not even a preference for any order between two adjectives.



According to Forsyth, color comes after shape:





Quality > Size > Shape > Color > Provenance
The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase




However, in real life, "yellow rectangular" has 99,200 results while "rectangular yellow" gives 94,200 results. The same pattern appears, more drastically in fact, when looking at the results in Google Scholar. "Yellow rectangular" has 2,090 results as opposed to "rectangular yellow" with 489 results.



Ngrams indicates it's been a battle:






(Is it really a law when it can change so often?)






In other cases, it's just anarchy:





[Data from COCA]




According to Forsyth (I think), those all should be opinion-size, i.e. 2+1 as in the second column — but all of them are mixed, and some go pretty strongly the other way.



Big bad modifier order



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