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Re: [lojban] Why left-grouping of tanru?

TR NS, On 06/09/2014 16:55:

On Friday, September 5, 2014 3:48:57 AM UTC-4, And Rosta wrote:

    On 4 Sep 2014 20:50, "TR NS" <tran...@gmail.com> wrote:
     > Also this isn't just my bias. Although it is hard for me to speak for any language beyond English, but there are known patterns from which I am drawing my opinion. See http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/25/paper1473.pdf <http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/25/paper1473.pdf> for example.

    How is that paper relevant to the thread topic?

It is just one example of a paper on the patterns of adjective order. Actually I just found this site which is more to the point: http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/adjectives/order-adjectives If you look at the order you can see they entail a right-to-left application. Left-to-right application only occurs when one of the adjectives themselves needs to be modified, i.e. there is a sub-clause, so to speak.


I still don't see how semantic constraints on the ordering of English attributive adjectives leads you to conclude that you have empirical warrant for believing 'right grouping' is cross-linguistically more natural than 'left grouping'.

Somewhat less irrelevant would be frequencies of left and right grouping in English binominal compounds ("door handle designs", "student handle designs") -- somebody's probably studied that already, tho I've never seen such a study myself. English allows both left and right grouping and distinguishes them prosodically.

In iterable adjunction-like constructions, one would expect, given considerations of parsing, that head--dependent ordering would be very strictly left-grouping and dependent--head ordering would be pretty strongly left-grouping.

--And.

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