Order of adjectives

Question

Hi,Which of the following is correct?1) a new difficult history book2) a difficult new history bookI consider "new" and "difficult" an adjectives of "age" (or "fact") and "opinion". So, I would pick up #2. What do you think?One friend of mine believes that "A new difficult history book" means a history book which is, in the first place, "not easy to understand" and , in the second place, "not seen before". Similarly, "a new difficult situation" means a situation which is ,firstly, hard to handle" and ,secondly, "not faced before". Normally we do not say "a difficult new situation" or "a difficult new history book". I , however, believe "a new difficult history book" means there is a whole series of difficult books and this is a new one among them. It makes no sense to me. It's like someone deliberately publishes difficult history books.Corpus frequency: 18 for "difficult new" and 1 for "new difficult".Thank you.

GPY · Accepted Answer

I agree that (2) is the usual order.

I don't agree that (1) doesn't make sense though. For example, if you have been discussing how you have to read a lot of difficult books, it's conceivable that someone might say "... and now here's a new difficult history book".

BillJ · Answer

In the absence of special factors, adjectives of an evaluative nature like "difficult" , "good/bad", excellent etc., precede age modifiers like "new", "old", "young", etc., so your second example a difficult new history book would be the norm.

If we analyse it, there are three layers of modification: "book" is first modified by "history" to form

If we analyse it, there are three layers of modification: "book" is first modified by "history" to form the nominal "history book", and this in turn is modified by "new", to give the nominal "new history book". This is then modified by "difficult" to give the meaning "a book that is difficult by the standards applicable to new history books".

If we reverse the order, as in a new difficult history book, things are slightly different. There are again three layers of modification: as before, "book" is modified by "history" to form the nominal "history book", but this time it is modified by "difficult" to form "difficult history book", which in turn is modified by "new" to allow a somewhat different interpretation -- "a difficult history books that happens to be new".

This kind of construction with multiple modifiers is known as 'stacking', as opposed to 'coordination' where the modifiers are separated by punctuation.

Order of adjectives

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