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Adjectives : position
Message de willy54 posté le 20-02-2007 à 13:20:38 (S | E | F | I)
Hello everybody,
I' d like someone , who masters English well, to clarify for me thechronological order of adjectives in a sentence: which precedes which? Illustrate your answer with examples, please. Thanks.
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Modifié par whynot95 le 21-02-2007 05:35
+ titre
Message de willy54 posté le 20-02-2007 à 13:20:38 (S | E | F | I)
Hello everybody,
I' d like someone , who masters English well, to clarify for me the
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Modifié par whynot95 le 21-02-2007 05:35
+ titre
Réponse: Adjectives : position de mister, postée le 21-02-2007 à 01:49:23 (S | E)
hello,
Actually, to master English language needs much time and a lot of skills like an English teacher. My answer, I would give you, is mere from a modest learner who hopes to reach that level one day.
So, back to your question, you are right to ask about the order of the adjectives when they are many next the noun: it should be known and respected. But let me first notice that rather to say chronological order I prefer to say hierarchical order. Because it is more accurate as this one emphasizes the importance of the order. Look at the following pattern, please
Article + (personal appreciation) + (seize, shape or dimension) + (age) + (colour) + (nationality, religion or label) + the noun
As you can seen next the noun, the more the adjective specifically qualifies it, the nearer its hierarchical position is. And on the contrary case, the less, the further. In this pattern, the adjectives range from nationality, or label, to personal appreciation through the shape, age and colour. How is that? According to what has just been said, the nationality or the label characterises the person for ever. Isn’t it? so does the colour. But the age may change of course over time, and so and so.
Now to finish, here is an example: A cute slim young blond Swedish woman.
there are further informations with exercise in this link:
Lien Internet
Thank you for your interesting new grammatical question. Bye!
Réponse: Adjectives : position de chrislondon, postée le 28-04-2007 à 12:31:33 (S | E)
Hi,
In general the adjective which is closest to the noun has the closest link with the noun and shows more permanence.
We usually put them in this order:
How good?/How big?/How old?/What shape?/what colour?/Where from?/made of?/What kind or what for? and then the noun.
e.g. A beautiful,small,ancient,round,white, Japanese,porcelain dinner plate.
A good way to remember the order is to invent a sentence from the first letters of these words:
Opinion/size/age/shape/colour/nationality/material/ use/
Oh,She Added Shirley Can Never Meet Us.
It doesn't matter how silly the sentence is if you remember the order.
It's a tricky point, but the good thing is that nobody would normally use more than three adjectives in front of the noun.
chrislondon
Réponse: Adjectives : position de marlond, postée le 28-04-2007 à 18:40:44 (S | E)
Hi there,
I'm a native speaker and I wouldn't pay too much attention to some of these 'rules' - they're generally right, but I did the exercise, out of curiosity, and I'd say the first one's subjective:
"a small interesting Spanish book" or "an interesting small Spanish book"
I'd definitely say the first one, and I've asked a few other natives and they agree with me. Same thing with
'A beautiful,small,ancient,round,white, Japanese,porcelain dinner plate.' - I'd say 'a small, beautiful round, white, ancient Japanese porcelain dinner plate' - putting 'ancient' with Japanese, as those adjectives are very much connected, and again it seems more natural to me to put the 'size' attribute first.
But that's just my opinion - I'm just trying to show you that the order is not absolute, and you could even change it totally if you wanted to put a stress on certain adjectives, though generally, it's fairly important, I suppose.
Réponse: Adjectives : position de chrislondon, postée le 28-04-2007 à 23:43:15 (S | E)
Hi,
There are many variations on this order, and you can change it depending on the emphasis you want to give the sentence. This is just an idea. See Oxford Practice Grammar by John Eastwood for interesting exercises on this.
christine
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