Adjective-Noun order

Wed Feb 20 07:05:58 UTC 2013

The following is from Peter Jenks and myself:

In Basaa, a Bantu language (A43, Cameroon), there is a lexical distinction
that is really between 'adjectives' (or property concepts) that are
adjectives and 'adjectives' (or property concepts) that are nouns. These
different groups have clearly distinct syntactic distributions, with the
nominal adjectives functioning as heads (preceding the modified noun) and
the true adjectives following nouns and agreeing with them. More details
are here:

http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~jenks/Research_files/HymanJenksMakasso_AdjectivesinBasaa.pdf

On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 10:37 PM, Eitan Grossman <
eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

> 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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