One of the first grammar rules any student of English must learn is that the adjectives in a sentence have to come before the noun. That simple rule explains why we say “Charlie Chaplin made some wonderful films”, and not “some films wonderful”. However, things get more complicated when we have two or more adjectives to characterise a noun. Here are a few more syntax rules on how to arrange adjectives in the correct order.
Rule 1: categories
Take a look at this sentence: “Charlie Chaplin made some black and white wonderful films”. All the adjectives are placed before the noun but the sentence still sounds wrong. In English, as in other languages, when we use more than one adjective together, their order usually depends on what category the adjective belongs to. Is it an adjective expressing opinion (good, awful, lovely…)? Or size (big, tiny, enormous…)? Or material (wooden, metal, cotton…)?
Most English grammar books identify between eight and ten different categories of adjectives and give the order in which they should appear. It’s only a guide and there is some flexibility but here’s the order that usually sounds most natural. Adjectives that express opinion always come first, followed by size, shape, age, colour, origin, material, and purpose. This rule of categories certainly works to make our example sound more natural: “Charlie Chaplin made some wonderful black and white films”. The adjective ‘wonderful’ expresses opinion, so it has to come before ‘black and white’, which express colour.
Rule 2: irreversible binomials
So, if we take care to place the adjectives before the noun and follow the rule of categories, why does the following sentence sound wrong?: “Charlie Chaplin made some wonderful white and black films.” The answer is the rule of irreversible binomials: pairs of words that go together in a fixed order. For example, we say ‘black and white’, not ‘white and black’; ‘fish and chips’, not ‘chips and fish’; ‘pros and cons’, not ‘cons and pros’. Reversing the order just sounds unnatural. There are a lot of these pairs of words to remember, so here are a few tricks to help you decide on the word order within the pairs:
1. The order should show a logical progression, for example: ‘first and second’; ‘old and new’; ‘first and last’;’ to and fro’; ‘trial and error’; ‘cause and effect’.
2. Put the most positive word first: ‘life and death’; ‘pros and cons’; ‘good and evil’; ‘highs and lows’; ‘ups and downs’; ‘dos and dont’s’.
3. The word with more semantic significance goes first. This is the most subjective area, but does have its logic. Try reading aloud the following pairs, and then try reading them in the reverse order. Which sounds more natural? ‘Black and white’ or ‘white and black’?; ‘Knife and fork’ or ‘fork and knife’?; ‘Meat and veg' or ‘veg and meat’?; ‘Bacon and eggs’ or ‘eggs and bacon’?; ‘Fish and chips’ or ‘chips and fish’? (Although, to some, chips may have more semantic importance than fish!)
4. The word with more syllables goes second: ‘ladies and gentlemen’, ‘pride and prejudice’. In some cases, more than one trick may be at work, like with ‘salt and pepper’ (tricks 3 and 4), or ‘research and development’ (tricks 2 and 4).
Rule 3: Ablaut reduplication
There’s one more trick to irreversible binomials that may explain, for example, why the story of Little Red Riding Hood features a ‘big bad wolf’ and not a ‘bad big wolf’? According to the rule of adjective categories, shouldn’t opinion come before size? Yes, generally. But here the sound of the vowels ‘i’ and ‘a’ in ‘big’ and ‘bad’ becomes significant in deciding the order thanks to a rule called ‘ablaut reduplication’. This linguistic phenomenon, which is less complicated than it sounds, describes the tendency in English (and some other languages) to put words that sound similar in order according to their vowel sounds. And the order we prefer is: ‘i, a, o’. This explains why we break the rule of categories and put ‘big’ before ‘‘bad’ and why ‘skin and bone’ sounds more natural than ‘bone and skin’.
Ablaut reduplication also explains why we play ‘ping-pong’ and not ‘pong ping’; why the noise a clock makes is ‘tick tock’, and not ‘tock tick’; why a cheap little souvenir or ornament is a ‘knick-knack’; why if we progress by sharp turns to one side and to the other we’re doing a ‘zigzag’, and why a trivial conversation is ‘chitchat’.