Adjective-Noun order

[Bjoern Wiemer]

Dear Jennifer Culbertson,
Ppolish is quite well known (at least within Slavic) as allowing (or 
even requiring) some of its adjectives to occur after its head noun. 
This phenomenon is regular with (non-gradable) attributive adjectives 
denoting stable features or within in fixed denominations, e.g. in 
different sorts of terminologies (e.g., je;zyk polski, niemiecki, 
chin'ski etc., i.e. 'Polish, German, Chinese (language)', but also 
things like okres inkubacyjny 'incubation period/interval',  ). 
Sometimes you can have either way with (probaly) only a difference in 
frequency (e.g., "dochód miesie;czny" vs. "miesie;czny dochód" 'monthly 
earnings', or "rytua? magiczny" vs. " magiczny rytua?" 'magic ritual'), 
but in some cases differences of meaning are observable as in (I guess), 
e.g., "regu?y rytualne" (= 'rules that are part of an established 
ritual/of rituals') vs. "rytualne regu?y" '(= 'rules that resemble 
rituals/look like acquiring a ritual character'). In any case, where 
such a variation exists, the head noun-adjective order always denotes a 
stable, fixed notion (and the adjective cannot be graded, it has no 
comparative).
     I'm not a native speaker, nor am I familiar with more specific 
literature on this subject (which certainly exists, mostly, I guess in 
Polish). But I happened to accidentally find one article which might be 
pertinent for your question:

Tabakowska, E. (2007):
Iconicity and linear ordering of constituents within Polish NPs.
In: D. Divjak, A. Kochan'ska (eds.): Cognitive Paths into the Slavic 
Domain. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 411-430.

Good luck!

Björn Wiemer

> 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 


-- 
Björn Wiemer
Professor für Slavische Sprachwissenschaft
Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität
Institut für Slavistik
Jakob-Welder-Weg 18
D- 55099 Mainz
tel. ++49/ 6131/ 39 -22186
fax ++49/ 6131/ 39 -24709
e-mail: wiemerb at uni-mainz.de
http://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/wiemerb/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20130219/08eb1422/attachment.htm>