earticle

영어

Despite the long-standing belief that premodifying adjectives in English are strictly ordered, recent studies have discovered these four observational facts: ① They have preferred ordering; ② Some adjectives allow ordering variation among themselves, but others do not; ③ Non-intersective adjectives show strange distribution, occur- ring before and after intersective ones; ④ If two instances of the same adjective occur consecutively, the s-level one precedes the i-level one. In order to explicate the four properties, I critically review representative previous studies, especially, Cinque (1994, 2010, 2014) and Scontras, et al. (2016), and argue that they are far from satisfactory. Instead, I propose the inherence restriction on adjective ordering (IRA): More inherent adjectives are located closer to the head noun. The IRA can explain the observational facts ①, ②, and ④, by assuming that inherence is measured by sustainablity of the property denoted by an adjective. What about ③? Adopting distributed morphology, I show that the distinction between NP-internal and NP-external adjectives is sufficient to explain it.