Robert Truswell

Attributive Adjectives and Nominal Templates

The main interest of these heterogeneous and apparently arbitrary hierarchies stems from the hypothesis that the heads regulating adjective order may form part of the linear functional sequence often assumed to regulate nominal morphosyntactic and semantic properties, a connection that Cinque (1999) investigated with respect to adverbials and clausal functional structure. Viewed in this light, these hierarchies make a clear and testable prediction: movement aside, and disregarding exceptional word orders linked to marked information structures, if two adjectives belong to different classes, only one relative order of the two should be possible. Section 1 will test this prediction against data gathered from www.google.co.uk. The data attest to a far greater freedom with respect to order among multiple adjectives than predicted by the models in (1). In section 2,