Back in 2013 I posted about Cooper and Ross’s paper “World Order” (“We began the present study by asking, as some linguists have asked before us, why the ordering of certain conjoined elements is fixed”), but the thread immediately turned to the order of the elements in “Watson and Crick”; I’m now presenting Mark Liberman’s very interesting Log post responding to a question about a recent Saturday Night Live sketch using the phrases “big dumb hat” and “dumb little dog”: “Whither English’s rigid adjective order?” Mark says:
There’s a long history of work on related topics, starting with Pāṇini. A classic and accessible reference is Cooper and Ross’s brilliant 1975 paper “World Order“. They focus primarily on the order of elements in conjunctions (“bigger and better”, “fore and aft”, “cat and mouse”, “now and then”, “here and there”, …), and describe a complex web of semantic and phonological influences. They cite Jespersen in support of the idea that such “freezing” also applies “in compound words, particularly compounds involving reduplication” (“namby-pamby”, “razzle-dazzle”, “hickory-dickory-dock”). And they also note (pp. 94-96) that “It seems safe to conclude […] that at least some of the principles governing the ordering of conjuncts and the ordering of prenominal adjectives are the same.”
On the phonological side, they list the following constraints (p.71):
Compared to place 1 elements, place 2 elements contain, other factors being equal:
1. more syllables (Pāṇini’s law)
2. longer resonant nuclei
3. more initial consonants
4. a more obstruent initial element, if both place 1 and place 2 elements start with only one consonant
5. vowel containing a lower second formant frequency
6. fewer final consonants
7. a less obstruent final segment, if both place 1 and place 2 elements end in a single consonant
It’s complicated, as he says (there are more subtleties at the link), and also a good example of how messy language can be.
Why is the paper titled “world order” ? It’s about word order, not world order. Unless the authors are emitting a low-frequency Whorf vibe.
Perhaps part of the explanation is that the paper was given at a “parasession”, whatever that may be.
I like this example under Patriotic: “Yale-Harvard game (said in New Haven) or Harvard-Yale game (said in Cambridge).”
@Stu: For linguists, word order is world order. Nothing else matters.
I had to look up ‘obstruent’, so my qualifications as a judge are nil.
Do these leftpondian pairs fit the rules of World Order?
Don and Phil. (The Everly Bros.)
Bell & Howell
Hewlitt Packard
Pitney Bowes
Smith & Wesson
Click & Clack (National Public Radio, “The car guys”)
Heckle and Jeckle (Cartoon crows)
¡científicos soberbios!
The order of the adjectivals is: redux, rich, at rest, remembered.
It’s difficult to actually observe the ordering at these Angstrom scales, though.
It would be pragmatically odd to say “Yale-Harvard game” in New Haven, suitable only for talking to a clueless outsider. For any interlocutor with any context one would merely say “the Harvard game” (it being obvious what team is playing Harvard) or “the [capital-G] Game.” (Yale having just beaten Princeton’s hitherto undefeated-this-year team on Saturday, the stakes this coming Saturday are arguably higher than usual.)
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!
@cuchuflete: in names of partnerships and other business firms composed of the surnames of founders or other prominent personalities, the order of the components is I believe most frequently driven by relative power or general “office politics,” with comparatively few ordering possibilities sounding so weird that euphony-for-its-own-sake will be the dominant consideration. One then gets used to what one is used to, so (to use accounting as an example) “Young & Ernst” or “Waterhouse Price” or “Touche & Deloitte” all sound odd because unexpected. But the world could have been otherwise if certain prior contingent decisions had fallen out otherwise than they did, and then we would be habituated to what the firms were called in that alternate timeline.
Friend of mine in college wrote her linguistics term paper on the question of whether a fucking big truck is bigger than a big fucking truck. Don’t recall what the final answer was, but she had fun going around asking people.
I say a big fucking truck is bigger.
Sadly, this does not work with bloody great lorries.
It strikes me that rhythm might sometimes be a factor, which could play out differently with and without a conjunction. Bell & Howell has a nice trochee rhythm. Bell Howell would have a different rhythm. Not sure how significant that is, but it seems like something that might sometimes at least come into play, especially with naming things. (These thoughts came out of reading the list in cuchuflete’s comment.)
I assumed cuchuflete was being tongue-in-cheek with the business names, since those are determined as J.W. Brewer says. In Don & Phil, Don was the older, that seems sufficient to me. Invented and fictional names do follow the rules: Click & Clack is perfectly regular by rule 5, as in knickknack, zigzag, flimflam, mishmash, tic-tac-toe. Heckle & Jeckle follows rule 4.
(Brett, DE: well played!)
(Seconded!)
There is an unpaved road into Yosemite Nat’l Park that is called “the Old Big Oak Flat Road.” Which of these words are nouns, which are adjectives, and how the adjectives modify the nouns is an exercise left for the reader.
Bloix: Here’s my guess:
There are two locations nearby; one is called Big Oak Flat and the other is called Little Oak Flat. They are both valleys in an otherwise hilly area, probably big enough to have at least a few farms on them. Big Oak Flat Road is the road you take to get to Big Oak Flat from some other, more central, location. Except they rerouted the road at some point. What is left of the original road is now called Old Big Oak Flat Road.
I don’t really know the answer, but that is how I would interpret it.
@ktschwarz: Your list of pairs, with knickknack, zigzag, flimflam, etc., raises another question. Why is that particular vowel sequence (/ɪ/ then /æ/) so common in such minimal pair duplications? This is true to the extent that Yiddish mishmosh has been largely replaced by mishmash with the /ɑ/ going to /æ/ (although there’s probably something eggcorn-ish going on there with the -mash part, as well as the phonetic preference).
(I honestly thought that the Updike joke was almost too cheap to make, and I considered deleting it rather than going ahead and posting it.)
Yiddish mishmosh has been largely replaced by mishmash
My understanding is that mishmash is the older form, found in English many centuries back, and mishmosh is a Yiddishized version of it.
Does the “zigzag” pattern of /ɪ/ to /æ/ fit the “vowel containing a lower second formant frequency” pattern suggested by Cooper/ Ross? I ask this because I am too lazy to do the googling to educate myself on which vowels’ second formant frequencies are higher/lower than which other vowels’ … The side of my undergraduate linguistics department on which people used and understood NP’s like “second formant frequency” was the side I avoided in my youth, for better or for worse.
Amazingly, per the OED, the Yiddish and English mishmashes could be cognates. English attests mismash since 1585 (and mysse-masche from 1475), and German attests Mischmasch since the 1500s.
Yeah, “lower second formant frequency” is nerdview. I looked it up in Wikipedia to check that it meant what I thought it did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formant#Phonetics
The paper actually gives the sequence as:
i > ɪ > ɛ > æ > a > ɔ > o > u
similar to the table in Wikipedia.
“Increasing lip protrusion” works too (as a heuristic).
My mother and father were Inger og Per to my mom’s family, and vice versa to my dad’s, of course. Which came into play when my mother’s cousin Per married his Inger. Saying Per og Inger then had obvious but different referents in the two families. Something something local relevance.
@Stu Clayton:
Their conclusion is as follows:
“Ceratosaurus dentisulcatus is one kickass big theropod.”
– Mickey Mortimer
on the question of whether a fucking big truck is bigger than a big fucking truck
To me – admittedly not a native speaker – a big fucking truck is a truck that is inconvenient in some way that might be slightly compounded by being big, while a fucking big truck is a truck whose salient feature is that it is big. So a fucking big truck is (probably) bigger.
As for kickass big theropods, at first glance I’d interpret it as having to mean “particularly kickass for a big theropod”, but *big kickass theropod feels impossible so it might be the only option for those two adjectives anyway.
(Incidentally, is it “theropod” or “therapod”? I feel like I want to spell it the latter way but I’m not sure why and that doesn’t seem to make sense – while my browser spellchecker underlines both.)
[EDIT: “theropod” is indeed correct, apparently – though Wiktionary has separate entries for therapod and theropod, with similar but differently phrased definitions, that don’t even link to each other.]
Why is the paper titled “world order” ? It’s about word order, not world order. Unless the authors are emitting a low-frequency Whorf vibe.
AFAIK there’s been some research that constituent orders like that (also for e.g. adverbs) work in roughly the same way in many different languages; in other words, it’s a world order is that it’s an order that’s the same all over the world. Though of course it probably wouldn’t have been phrased that way without the pun on “word order”.
But I hadn’t read the actual paper so for all I know there’s a completely different reason.
To me – admittedly not a native speaker – a big fucking truck is a truck that is inconvenient in some way that might be slightly compounded by being big, while a fucking big truck is a truck whose salient feature is that it is big. So a fucking big truck is (probably) bigger.
Hmm… I think you’re (probably) right.
I think kickass big is what comes after big-ass; C. dentisulcatus is indeed unexpectedly big for a Ceratosaurus.
I’ve opened the discussion page of *shudder* “therapod” by asking if this misspelling should really get an entry instead of just a redirect. It seems to me that a is slowly but surely becoming the default spelling for schwa in Vaguely American.
I suspect you’re right; frankly, I’m surprised it isn’t “therapod” — that’s how I would have spelled it.
The name is Theropoda, “beast-footed ones”…
…some have actually wondered if Theropoda and Ornithopoda got mixed up in the very, very, very fast publication process typical of the Bone Wars…
Wiktionary also calls thero- an alternative form of therio-.
A therio- should really be smaller, and not kickass big at all.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B8%CE%B7%CF%81%CE%AF%CE%BF%CE%BD
What’s with WP giving the (presumably British) pronunciation of Theropoda as /θɪəˈrɒpədə/? I would not have expected the diphthong.
Lots of genus names of Mesozoic mammals end in -therium because it’s a diminutive.
I think the Wikipedia pronunciations of a lot of technical terms are mechanically derived from the spellings by people who’ve never heard people in the fields in question say them. The diphthong is clearly supposed to be the NEAR vowel, which makes some sense, except that the syllable is probably too unstressed to support it.
J. C. Wells in LPD has [e], no diphthong at all. The word isn’t listed in CEPD.
I think I’ve heard it with DRESS, KIT and COMMA~NURSE, but not with NEAR.
maidhc- apologies for the late response.
As you surmised, “flat” in this context is a noun, not an adjective modifying “road,” and that “old” does modify “road,” not “oak.” But you’re off-base in your conjecture that “big” doesn’t modify “oak.”
The trick is that a “flat” in the Sierra Nevadas is a meadow. In the early years of the California Gold Rush, several mines were established in Tuolumni County, and a trading post was set up to serve the miners. The store was in a large meadow whose distinguishing feature was a huge oak tree- the big oak- standing alone in its center. A settlement grew up around the store, and was called Big Oak Flat. Eventually a road was built and was for decades the main road into Yosemite Valley. Far from being flat, the Big Oak Flat Road had grades as steep as any road open to automobiles in the country. In the 1930s, a new road, still called the Big Oak Flat Road, was built with bridges and tunnels to provide safer, year-round access to the park. Eventually the old road was closed to traffic and survives as a hiking trail named the Old Big Oak Flat Road.
Even without that history (which I didn’t know), “Old *** Road” is a common template, which leaves “Big Oak Flat”. There are plenty of Big Oaks but I haven’t heard of any “Big *** Flat” placenames where the *** unambiguously goes with “Flat”.
Even without that history (which I didn’t know), “Old *** Road” is a common template, which leaves “Big Oak Flat”. There are plenty of Big Oaks but I haven’t heard of any “Big *** Flat” placenames where the *** unambiguously goes with “Flat”.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any three-part Big (X Y), as opposed to (Big X) Y, placenames in general, TBH. (On second thought it could make sense if Y was something like “lake” or “mountain”, though even then I’d expect either “Great” or a geographical indicator.)
Meanwhile in Russian such constructions are not ambigous – and normal.
Cluain Gamhna Mór/Clongawny More (Co. Offaly) = big calf meadow, but the big refers to the meadow, not the calf. Nearby one can find
the townlands Clongawny and Clongawny Beg .
January 1st – right, but if you don’t know what a flat is, then when you encounter the full phrase (as I did on my first trip to Yosemite), you can’t make sense of it – the flat road that goes past the old big oak? how odd!
Maidhc, who is cleverer than me, figured out that Big Oak Flat is a place name (how did you manage that, Maidhc?)
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any three-part Big (X Y), as opposed to (Big X) Y, placenames in general
Big Rock Candy Mountain.
@Y: I parse that as (Big (Rock Candy)) Mountain, as if the entire mountain here formed from a jagged block of crystalline sugar. However my impression of the song was heavily influenced by this recording (retained from my mother’s own childhood), which characterized the Big Rock Candy Mountain as a fun mountain for kids. It was not until I was an adult that I realized the song was actually a hobo tune.
That’s how I visualize the mountain, too, but I think of Rock Candy here as more of a substance than an object. Others have visualized it (or them, mountains) as made of lots of rock candies.
@Y: That painting—especially, but not entirely, the central hobo—strikes me a surprisingly creepy. I was not familiar with the artist, Roger Medearis, but apparently he was a student of Thomas Hart Benton, although he quit painting for many years when interest turned away from his style of work. Looking at a selection of Medearis’s art, he mostly seems to have created works that look typical for a protege of Benton. But in “In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,” even though I recognize a lot of the specific elements it is depicting from the song (cigarette trees, cops with wooden legs, empty boxcars, bulldogs with rubber teeth, hens laying hard-boiled eggs, and—of course—the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings), it seems like a weird Benton/Salvador Dali/Hieronymus Bosch stylistic mashup.
It was certainly a kids’ song for me too (with a much-later-recognized hobo connection), though my exposure was to the Burl Ives version (hence my use of his photo when I posted my Iraq War parody of the lyrics). But I’d parse it as Big ((Rock Candy) Mountain).
January 1st-
In southeastern Oregon there’s an unusual geologic feature called Steen’s Mountain – a single isolated mountain 50 miles long, 20 miles wide, and 9700 feet high. There are two waterfalls in the area whose names take the form Big xxx Creek Falls – Big Indian Creek Falls and Big Alford Creek Falls. In these names “Big” doesn’t modify “falls” – it’s part of the name of the creek. That is, there is a Big Indian Creek and a Little Indian Creek, and a Big Alford Creek and a Little Alford Creek. So these are the sort of Big (X,Y) names that you posited might exist but that you hadn’t heard of.
There’s also Upper Big Alford Creek Falls, which are upstream from Big Alford Creek Falls.
And there’s Little Willow Creek Falls in Little Willow Creek, and Little Blitzen Canyon Falls, in Little Blitzen Canyon. And there’s Upper Canyonwood Creek Falls which are upstream from Canyonwood Creek Falls, both in Canyonwood Creek.
(Steen’s Mountain is a wonderfully isolated and undeveloped place to hike and camp. Stargazers love it because there’s almost no light pollution.)
Yale having just beaten Princeton’s hitherto undefeated-this-year team on Saturday, the stakes this coming Saturday are arguably higher than usual.
Bulldogs Win The Game 19-14. Boola boola!