Adjective-Noun order

Jan Wohlgemuth jan at LINGUIST.DE
Tue Feb 19 17:40:49 UTC 2013


Dear Jennifer,
in German, the order changed, or rather became less flexible in Old High 
German. Modern German only has a few adjectives that can "violate" the 
rule of Adj-N and follow the noun while being uninflected:

purer Spaß 		: Spaß pur
pure.M.Nom.Sg. fun 	: fun pure

It only works with a handful of adjectives; many -if not most- of them 
are loanwords e.g. (pur, light, live, online)

Best,
Jan


Am 19.02.2013 17:55, schrieb Jennifer Culbertson:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm interested in examples of languages which have lexically-determined
> exceptions to a general adjective placement rule. A very well-documented
> example is French, in which adjectives are generally post-nominal but a
> (small) lexically-determined set can be pre-nominal. Do you know of other
> examples?
>
> I'm also interested in whether anyone knows of any typological work which
> might suggest whether this kind of variation is more common for adjectives
> compared to numerals (or vice versa). I know of cases in which the
> placement of the numerals one and/or two differ from other numerals, but I
> don't have a sense for how common that is.
>
> Thanks in advance for your help!
>
> Jennifer Culbertson
> Assistant Professor
> Linguistics Program
> George Mason University
>


-- 
Jan Wohlgemuth, M.A.
Institut für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Muenster
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