Adjective-Noun order

[Nigel Vincent]

Dear Jennifer,
There is a lot of literature on the position of the adjective in the Romance languages, and I would say that the consensus is that it is more a matter of meaning than of lexical specification. For French I would mention in particular the book by Linda Waugh "A semantic analysis of word order: position of the adjective in French" (Ledien, Brill 1977). A more recent treatment that compares a range of Romance languages and argues that [Adj N] and [N Adj] are distinct constructions (in the Construction Grammar sense)  is Hans-Ingo Radatz "Die Semantik der Adjektivstellung" (Tübingen, Niemeyer 2001). I have also written an article on the issue that surveys the recent literature. I will send you a copy of that separately.
Best,
Nigel



Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA
Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics
The University of Manchester

Vice-President for Research & HE Policy, The British Academy

Linguistics & English Language
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
The University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL
UK



http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/lel/staff/nigel-vincent/
________________________________
From: Discussion List for ALT [LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG] on behalf of Jennifer Culbertson [jculber4 at GMU.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2013 4:55 PM
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: Adjective-Noun order

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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20130219/f798d561/attachment.htm>