earticle

영어

It is a well-known fact that more than one attributive adjectives functioning as a noun modifier show relatively fixed sequential order. For example, subjective adjectives like pretty, nice, or delicious appear before descriptive adjectives like size, shape, or colour when two adjectives at the same time modify a noun. In addition, adjectives describing size, shape, and colour show relatively fixed sequential order: size < shape < colour < noun. It has been suggested that the sequential ordering constraint on adjective co-occurrences is based on the iconic principle of proximity. This indicates that some adjectives that are conceptually more strongly related to the noun are also syntactically close to it. More specifically, the subjective (qualifying) adjectives are least close to or most distant from nouns, and descriptive adjectives are close to the semantic nature of nouns. This paper aimed to investigate whether the sequential ordering constraint found in English could also be found in other languages like Korean. In this study, Korean adults and children aged 5-6 were tested by the picture-production task. The results from the present study demonstrate that even though there are some variations in the sequential ordering among descriptive adjectives, Korean children and adults show the sequential ordering constraint on adjective co-occurrences found in many languages.