So, if there is no innate grammar, why the phrase "large red ball" feels more correct than "red large ball", and in many languages (I can confirm only two)? If this is just a learned relationship between things, the order of the adjectives shouldn't matter. Furthermore, in Czech, words in sentence can be in many different orders (in particular, the ending word is the one that has emphasis), but order of adjectives still matters (or at least some feel right and some wrong). So we can learn and deal with different orderings of words.
> So, if there is no innate grammar, why the phrase "large red ball" feels more correct than "red large ball"
Word order is just dependent on language. In Romance languages it would be "large ball red"
No, the question is deeper.
Is there an innate parsing "hardware" that can parse (and produce) a phrase based on an structure? What are the limitations of that structure. (And I'd say that if there are no limitations this article is right)
There are several grammars that can encode "2 + 4 > 3" for example, you can express the same thing with a Lisp grammar, but beyond the grammar specifics, you're expressing a meaning
Oh my god, a png of a twitter featuring a png. What is this world we have created.
Anyways.. it's pretty damn interesting. When I read it, I seriously read the last sentence as "great green dragon" without thinking, then went back and saw that I actually read the words in the wrong order.
Oddly enough, a green great dragon makes me think there would be some distinct species of dragon called the "great dragon", that are sometimes green, whereas "great green dragon" makes me think of just a very large, green, run-of-the-mill dragon.
However, all of this seems to me entirely related to training, getting very very used to things being expressed in a certain way. I have no idea how it could relate to some "innate" idea of grammar, especially since, as others have pointed out, this rule and many others only hold for English. Any bilingual individual can tell straight away that these things are all about memory -- nothing "innate" about a bunch of arbitrary rules.
It can be, but the same order comes up naturally in many languages. If it really doesn't matter and is just a learned convention, it could be different in different languages, just like ordering of "subject verb" is a convention (but I am not a language expert, I really only know Czech and English).
Thing is, in order to disprove your example as evidence of "innate grammar", it suffices to find one language that doesn't order it that way. I bet there are quite a few where the order doesn't even matter at all (because there are other means to indicate what's what in a sentence).
> I bet there are quite a few where the order doesn't even matter at all.
One of my favorite Latin poems (not just mine, this one is famous for a reason) begins like so:
Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
Milton apparently translated this "almost word for word without Rhyme according to the Latin Measure, as near as the Language will permit" (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/fifth_ode/text...). Here is the relevant part of that translation:
What slender Youth bedew'd with liquid odours
Courts thee on Roses in some pleasant Cave,
Pyrrha[?]
And here, I'll rearrange Milton's words into the word order of the original poem:
What [many] slender thee youth on roses
bedew'd liquid courts odors
pleasant, Pyrrha, in cave?
(Milton's "with" is reflected in the Latin, but it is the ablative case ending of "liquidis odoribus" rather than a word in its own right. The "some" is not indicated in the Latin. "multa" is an adjective, "many", applying to "rosa"; Milton has left it out, although he has changed the oddly singular "rosa" to plural "roses".)
Anyway, this poem is pretty much the apex of artistic expression of "free word order". Latin does have some restrictions on word order, and one of them is visible in the poem: the object of a preposition must immediately follow that preposition (this is the origin of the belief that sentences can't end with a preposition -- in Latin, they can't). But mostly you can place the words where you'd like.
Thank you for the example. The "large red ball" case brought up by OP is slightly different, though, because it's not about subject/object/verb ordering, but rather about relative ordering of adjectives.
Even in languages that do allow for relatively free reordering (my native, Russian, is also like that, and also uses it heavily in poetry), "red large ball" just feels awkward compared to "large red ball", so I think there is, indeed, some actual linguistic law behind it that applies to at least these languages.
The stretch is to claim, on the basis of a few (or even a couple dozen) languages, that the law is indeed universal. It's the exact same mistake that European linguists have made before, because they were basing their assumptions on a bunch of closely related languages that they were familiar with - and once they started studying more "exotic" stuff, like Native American and Polynesian languages, it turned out that many of those assumptions were only true for that original subset they were working with, and didn't apply in general.
> why the phrase "large red ball" feels more correct than "red large ball",
Because size is relative quantity(large as relative to what) while red is absolute descriptor(color=red).
I don't think this is a sufficient explanation, only empirical observation. It could very well be other way around. I mean it's not even generally true that related words come together in sentence (things like "Who did you give the large red ball to?" spring to mind).
