ADJECTIVE ORDERS IN ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN: AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION

Abstract

The paper investigates experimentally the order of adjectives in British English and Romanian through Likert acceptability judgments. We focus on three categories of adjectives (Quality, Size, Color) and all their possible combinations in both languages. We show that there is a rigid ordering of adjectives in British English, i.e. the adjectival combinations of Quality-Size (beautiful big family), Quality-Color (special blue flowers), Size-Color (tiny blue butterfly) are natural for native English speakers, but the reverse adjectival orders Size-Quality (little special girl), Color-Quality (blue special flowers), Color-Size (blue tiny butterfly) were judged to be unnatural. In contrast, we found that in Romanian, a language where adjectives typically occur post-nominally, adjectives are more freely ordered, as the orders Size-Quality, Color-Quality, Color-Size were judged by participants as equally natural as the reverse adjective orders Quality-Size, Quality-Color, and Size-Color, e.g. the Color-Size order fluture albastru mititel, lit. ‘butterfly blue tiny’ was judged as equally natural by participants as the reverse Size-Color adjective order fluture mititel albastru, lit. ‘butterfly tiny blue’.