Summary

This section summarises the book in one paragraph and in order of importance to the argument developed, and then offers a summary chapter by chapter.

There is a normal, grammatically required unmarked order in English nominal premodifiers which consists of the order of the zones in which the words occur. There are four zones, each of which may have one word, many words (co-ordinated with each other), or none. The order of zones is at once semantic (that is, of words’ constituent types and dimensions of meaning– their ‘semantic structure’), and syntactic (that is, earlier words modify all the later words as a group and are subordinated to them). The normal order can be varied, in marked order: moving a word into a zone for which it has no conventionalised use gives the word emphasis, and requires the reader to interpret it with a new meaning of the type appropriate to its zone. When there are two or more words in a zone, speakers may grammatically put them in any order, but sometimes speakers choose to follow a stylistic principle for the order. Premodifier order has evolved historically, with the syntactic order developing in Middle English and the semantic order developing as an extra dimension by early in the Modern English period. The principles given just above are confirmed by information structure in the phrase, by the processes of grammaticalisation, and by what we know of psycholinguistic processing and of children’s acquisition of nominal phrase structure.