Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-24-2025
Abstract
This study builds upon Hesseltine and Davis ([2020]. “The Communicative Function of Adjective-Noun Order in English.” WORD 66 (3): 166–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.2020.1793499), which examines word order in modification in English and proposes the Assertion of Characterization hypothesis. To communicate an assertion of an entity’s traits, speakers employ two different meanings: weaker, signaled by the order AB as in long (A) hair (B), and stronger, signaled by BA as in hair (B) long (A). The attribution of the characterization is thus made less or more assertively. This work focuses on examples where the characterized entity, the B, is a form traditionally termed a “pronoun.” Although the hypothesis holds regardless of the traditional categorization, one particular aspect of characterized pronouns, which marks them as different from other types of characterized Bs, invites this further investigation: Pronouns, when characterized, occur much more frequently in the order that indicates the stronger Assertion of Characterization (BA, e.g., consider her lucky, meet someone special, vs. AB Lucky her!, a special someone). Examination of this subset of Bs accounts for the pattern: When a person chooses a pronoun, the implication is that the receiver of the communication knows enough to identify the referent adequately for present communicative purposes and so any further characterization will deserve to be strong there.
