Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 June 2

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June 2

English word order

The article Burger King Corporation v Hungry Jack's Pty Ltd, which discusses a company named Hungry Jack's, mentions the activities of a "senior Hungry Jack's executive". Why do we say this, and why does "Hungry Jack's senior executive" sound wrong? I'm a native speaker, and I've read about English word order (for example, Google-discovered pages mentioning "lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife"), but I still can't explain it. Because I know what a "senior executive" is, I know it's talking about an executive with seniority, who happened to work for Hungry Jack's, but the word order makes it sound as if this person was an executive, who worked for Hungry Jack's, and also happened to be senior, as if s/he were an "elderly Hungry Jack's executive". 49.198.51.54 (talk) 21:53, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

See Adjective#Order. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:45, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

(e/c) The order is specified at Adjective#Order. Hungry Jack's definitely falls under "origin" in that scheme, but senior could be "opinion" or it could be a "qualifier", and indeed I don't have an intuition that either way round is wrong, since as you point out (and as the section I linked to says), senior forms part of the compound noun senior executive, if you imagine that to be a compound noun. On the other hand I have no explanation for why, for instance, old little lady is wrong, or red little Corvette for that matter. It may simply be an arbitrary convention. Deviating from convention is distracting and interferes with rhetoric (unless used for effect), much like how inexplicable use of the font Curlz would interfere with reading a novel. Irreversible binomial seems related.  Card Zero  (talk) 22:48, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

I think they fall under the rubric of idiom. Native speakers speak a certain way, because that's how they were taught to speak, and the chain goes back forever. That certain way includes some expressions and word orders that are not amenable to analysis, but have evolved to their current state and are now embedded in the language as she is normally spoke. Anyone who says "I robbed an old little lady" would have two strikes against them, the worse of which would be that they're not "one of us". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:07, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

To me, the indicate two different thing, a "senior Hungry Jack's executive" can be one of several managers. "Hungry Jack's senior executive" can only mean only mean the top-most one. "A Hungry Jack's senior executive" is just a wrong construction. Rmhermen (talk) 18:04, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

"A Hungry Jack's senior executive" sounds fine to me, meaning one of the top tier. Clarityfiend (talk) 00:09, 5 June 2022 (UTC)