Attributive Adjective Ordering: A Comparison of Akan And English

When multiple adjectival modifiers occur in the English Noun phrase, speakers of the language have an intuitive idea of how they are to be sequenced. Linguists such as Hetzron (1978), Dixon (1982), Scott (2002), Sproat and Shih (1991), claim that this order of sequencing the adjectives is universal. According to Sproat and Shih (1991), “when Adjective Ordering Restrictions occur in a language, the ordering hierarchy is, at least to a first approximation, the one observed for English”. However, there are special patterns like (i) phonological re-ordering (ii)focus re-ordering (iii) indirect modification (iv) parallel modification that allow speakers of English to deviate from the proposed basic hierarchical order. Akan which is a language belonging to the Kwa language group and spoken in Ghana West Africa has not been widely studied when it comes to the ordering of adjectives. The study done reveals a relatively free ordering of Akan adjectival modifiers in the noun phrase. This work is a further investigation on whether Akan follows the proposed hierarchical order or exhibits one or more of the special patterns for deviation. Data for this work is the interview of 40 speakers of Akan using questionnaires on their intuitive judgment on how they sequence multiple adjectival modifiers in the Akan noun phrase. The outcome of the study shows that multiple adjectival modifiers in Akan seem to follow the basic hierarchical ordering for adjectives to a large extent, but Akan also exhibits characteristics of parallel modification which seem to hide any effect of the basic hierarchical order for multiple attributive adjectives