Adjective-Noun order

Wed Feb 20 06:37:23 UTC 2013

Two more non-Romance Afroasiatic languages:

In Coptic, adjectives aren't generally a distinct word class. What one
could call an adjectival construction involves the head noun followed by an
modifier marker (n-), then another noun. So:

ou-rOme n-noute 'a man of-god, a divine man'
ou-sEfe n-angelos 'a sword of-angel, an angelic sword'

However, there's a construction in which the order is reversed. In general
it's got an affective/rhetorical flavour, and has been compared to
constructions like the English 'a monster of a child' construction.

p-atna m-matoi 'the-merciless of-soldier' 'the merciless soldier'

With some lexemes, like those denoting 'big' and 'small' it is probably the
unmarked construction.

ou-noc m-mEESe 'a large of-crowd,' 'a large crowd'
nei-koui n-zOon 'these small of-creature' 'these small creatures'
Interestingly, two lexemes meaning 'small' are the only ones that can
directly follow the head noun, without n-. So I suppose one could consider
them 'real' adjectives.' This is pretty much what one would expect,
cross-linguistically (see Aikhenvald & Dixon 2004 on adjectives).

You can find information on this in Bentley Layton's Coptic Grammar, but it
was first discussed by Ariel Shisha-Halevy in his book 'Coptic Grammatical
Categories' (1986).

In Modern Hebrew, adjectives follow nouns, but in some cases, you have
nominals before nouns with an attributive reading, so

misiba tova 'party good' > 'a good party'
xara misiba 'shit party' > 'a shitty party'

I don't know who's written about this.
Best wishes,
Eitan

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 4:24 AM, Claire Bowern <clairebowern at gmail.com>wrote:

> To get us out of Romance, Bardi (Nyulnyulan, Australian) has the same
> semantic distribution of Adj N vs N Adj that Spanish does. cf moorrooloo
> aarli 'small fish' vs aarli moorrooloo 'fish, which are small'.
> Claire
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 7:27 PM, Daniel Hieber <dwhieb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Being a feature of Romance languages, it's of course no surprise that
>> Latin exhibits this as well. Typically in Latin the adjective follows the
>> noun, except in cases where the adjective indicates quantity or size (and
>> Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_grammar#Word_order> adds
>> beauty, goodness, or truth). Thus:
>>
>> magna urbs
>> large city
>>
>> cīvēs laetī
>> citizens happy
>>
>> In Spanish this is more semantically-conditioned than lexical.
>> Restrictive / classificational uses tend to come after the noun, while
>> nonrestritive / qualificational senses come before:
>>
>> amigo viejo 'friend who is old'
>> viejo amigo 'old/dear/longtime friend'
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Hartmut Haberland <hartmut at ruc.dk>wrote:
>>
>>> There are also a number of non-loans which can be used such in German,
>>> especially in expressions for food:
>>>
>>> Forelle blau (slightly boiled with vinegar or white wine added to the
>>> water, same as French truite au bleu; also Karpfen blau)
>>> Aal satt (as much eel as you can eat)
>>>
>>> I suspect many of them are fixed collocations rather than productive
>>> constructions.
>>>
>>> Less common in Danish:
>>>
>>> latte to go: a caffe latte to be consumed outside the premises
>>>
>>> Hartmut Haberland
>>>
>>> ________________________________________
>>> Fra: Discussion List for ALT [LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG]
>>> på vegne af Jan Wohlgemuth [jan at LINGUIST.DE]
>>> Sendt: 19. februar 2013 18:40
>>> Til: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>>> Emne: Re: Adjective-Noun order
>>>
>>> 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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>>> ==================================================================
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Omnis habet sua dona dies.
>>      ~ Martial
>>
>
>

-- 
Eitan Grossman
Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tel: +972 2 588 1885
Fax: +972 2 588 0265
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