Взаимное расположение атрибутивных прилагательных по данным тюркских текстов
Adjectival Ordering on the Data of Turkic Texts

Summary/Abstract: The paper aims at modelling of the ordering of adjectives from different semantic classes in a noun phrase from theoretical, typological and experimental perspectives. This phenomenon, being an issue with narrow theoretic scope, had been one of the starting points that gave rise to the cartographic syntax approach. The cartographic syntax approach, proposed and elaborated in formal linguistics, postulates a universal arrangement of adjectives from different semantic classes. Alternatively, in both formal and functional linguistics, it is sometimes suggested that adjectives inside a noun phrase do not create a strong hierarchy and the order of particular adjectives might be influenced by their lexical meaning. This paper discuses the results of the corpus study of Bashkir, Tatar, Turkish, Kazakh and Kyrgyz texts. The goal is to answer the question: Which of the noun phrase models suits the Turkic data better? For this study, we analyse the distribution of noun phrases with different orderings of multiple attributive adjectives belonging to 4 semantic classes: EVAL[uation], SIZE, AGE and COLOR. The data has been collected from the Wikipedia texts for the target languages (approx. 146M words). We came to the conclusion that adjectives do not form a strict hierarchy of functional projections, where each semantic class has its own position. The data from the selected Turkic languages show some patterns of adjectival ordering (such as SIZE-COLOR or AGE-SIZE). At the same time no strict ordrering restrictions have been observed. We conclude that treating adjectives as adjuncts in the noun phrase structure is a more suitable approach.

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