eg:
"large or small" and "big or little" sound "normal" to me but "small or large" and "little or big" sound abnormal, but I'm not sure why.
Posted May 10, 2022, 12:11 PM UTC
I think you're looking for the term "collocation", which describes arbitrarily preferred words:
THANK YOU THIS IS IT!
I think it’s not so much a universal grammar thing (like the infamous adjective order rule) but rather an accident of your particular exposure history and whether it happened to favor one or the other. In other words, it’s idiomatic rather than grammatical.
Notice that “little or big” is actually the more common phrasing, according to the Google n-gram, but both are used pretty regularly. By contrast, “large or small” does seem to be strongly preferred.
“Little or big” sounds totally fine to my ear, but one that makes me a little crazy is “mortar and pestle.” My husband says “pestle and mortar” sometimes and thinks nothing of it. To my ear, it has to be “mortar and pestle”. Imagine my chagrin just now when I checked the n-gram and “pestle and mortar” is actually more common. Curses!
I just wanted to back you up that "pestle & mortar" sounds like it holds a reversed order to me too, like "key car", whereas "mortar & pestle" sounds like the correct order to me, like "car key"... but there are admittedly some reasons why I can conceive of saying "pestle & mortar" in that order, if I mean to say something like, "take the pestle in hand, place herbs in the mortar, & grind into a fine pulver/powder."
When referring to the process again, I'd shorten it with, "it is easy to take pestle & mortar into hand & do it for all similar herbs."
However, when I hear, "take your mortar & pestle", I am essentially hearing that there is a mortar & it has a pestle in it already. Since that's the easiest way to keep them together or not drop & break a pestle, it makes the most sense to me that the word ordering should be "mortar & pestle".
However, when considering a similar setup with a cereal/soup spoon & a bowl, I'd instruct someone to serve the prepared dish with a spoon & a bowl in the order they'd ve set on a table, but I'd tell someone to take the bowl & spoon to the kitchen for them to be washed.
thank you for your answer. It may just be this. If enough style guides recommend it the same way it becomes a cultural rule.
This also reminds me of "big endian" or "little endian" operations in computing, which is not linguistics.
In linguistics, "order force" of adjectives refers to the rules by which multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech. You simply can’t say My Greek Fat Big Wedding, or leather walking brown boots.
The trouble is, virtually no one has written about how any social group begins to decide to say "big & tall" instead of "tall & big" in the "size" portion of "order force" adjectives... & few if any are talking about whether to say "(from) small &/to large" vs "(from) large &/to small".
When you do check sources like Google's Ngram viewer, you can see how terms like "big & tall" can occur far more often than "tall & big" which seems to suggest that the "size" portion of "order force" is "overall size, then height", as height may be related to the "shape" portion of order force.
However, this rule of which one goes where only relates to adjectives like "small/medium/large" or "little/average/big" if they they stand for overall size, height, or if they seem so ambiguous that they don't semantically have a set order, as of yet, in the dialect or idiolect of the speaker.
So, I, like you, wonder whether we should speak of "weird small & big old white French male retirees" or if "big & small" should be reversible.
Sometimes I think the rules of ablaut concerning set terms like "tick-tock" can cause "big & tall" to appear in thay order, & words similar to thrm with similar vowels get placed into those orders... but when the choices are "small & tall" vs "tall & small"...
#You may be referribg to "markedness".
On a slightly different note (ignoring the topic of markedness), oddly, sometimes shorter descriptors begin to have their own set phrasing, such as "little old women" & "dirty old men", which can cause speakers to treat the set words of the phrase as though they were one semantic unit & they begin to set adjectives before & after the ad hoc semantic unit, leading to sentences having impromptu casual expressions like "white, dirty old men" instead of "dirty old white men".
Also interestingly, someone may say "little old women" where "little" acts as a "size" function in the order force, but "young little girls" seems to have "little" function as a "shape" in the order force.
Therefore, I cannot assist you any further than I already have... unless it is an answer about markedness you nay be asking.
If you find out more, I'd love to hear about it because I have also wondered whether English grammar or the ideology of the speakers determines whether things are grouped from largest to smallest or smallest to largest in the order force of adjectives during speech & writing, & I think you nay be referring to markedness.
I think like many here you have veered into adjectival ordering which is not what I am after.
Another user has thankfully come to the rescue of us all:
Aha! So you WERE referring to markedness! That was my second guess, because it did seem you may have been wondering why "size" & "shape" can seem to swap places in adjectival order forcing in English, or possibly why "tick tock" & "clip clop" vowel sounds may affect where "big & small" vs "small & big" may appear in word ordering.
I'm so glad you figured out what you needed to know!
Linguistics fun fact; collocations in English are ordered by where the sound in the mouth comes from. We put the word that begins at the front if the mouth first because in English we like it that way.
Boys and girls (b is made at the lips and g is in the throat)
Men and women (m is made at the lips and w is made with the tongue and lips)
Small and large (s is made through the teeth and l is made on the alveolar ridge behind the teeth)
And so on
In short, they’re called collocations and they’re ordered that way because of where the sounds come from in our mouths
that's a cool fact but it doesn't help with why I feel its Large or Small, and not Small or Large.
It's general prototype theory.
We don't generally ask, "How short are you," but, "How tall are you?"
Same with "old."
but how do we know which comes first in a choice of two?
Look up adjectival word order, that can help
it's not that.
"Markedness."
The default nature allows unmarked lexical forms to be identified even when the opposites are not morphologically related. In the pairs old/young, big/little, happy/sad, clean/dirty, the first term of each pair is taken as unmarked because it occurs generally in questions. For example, English speakers typically ask how old someone is; use of the marked term (how young are you?) would presuppose youth.
THANK YOU! THIS IS THE INFORMATION I WAS LOOKING FOR!!
You're welcome. Thanks for the gold, too.
size, shape, color. Unless... you are emphasizing a subject or noun.
I know that, but I'm talking about why we say "large or small" and not "small or large"
It's not that either, that's the vowel ordering rule. but my words share the same vowel.
The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose.
Do you mean like this thing?
No, that's not it. thats adjectival ordering.
if anything what i'm looking for might be called "comparative ordering"?
"Small or large" sounds fine to me. Maybe because you like alphabetizing choices? lol.
No, it's a size and ordering thing. in the same way we can have a:
"large square green sausage" but not a "square green large sausage."
related video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M
Large or small. Small or large. They are both fine. It's just personal preference.
I believe they’re interchangeable, but most people go from smallest to biggest because those are the habits we built during early childhood education.
Except OP seems to strongly favor largest to smallest!
yeah i think i go from big to small
maybe a european vs american thing, like gray vs grey?
It’s a reasonable guess, but the Google n-grams don’t show a strong difference between British and American English (see my top-level comment).
https://nurseryrhymecentral.com/why-tick-tock-and-not-tock-tick-rule-of-ablaut-reduplication/
Beat me to it.
this is not it.