The Little Sweet Café

By R.L.G. | NEW YORK

WHEN the summer weather isn't too muggy, my wife and I take the longer walk to a subway station that gives us a shorter train ride. Every time, we pass this place. For the first time today, she, a non-native but fluent speaker of English, finally asked me: "shouldn't it be the Sweet Little Café?"

We went inside, got a coffee, and asked the owner where he was from. The Dominican Republic, it turned out. I confirmed with him that the most usual Spanish would be "el pequeño café dulce". This didn't help me determine whether his native language interfered: yes, "little" comes before "sweet" in this Spanish rendition, but it also comes before the noun: "the little café sweet". So I just asked him: why "little sweet", and not "sweet little"? "Well, the café is little, but it's not 'a little sweet'." That didn't really help me either. To my intuition, in "sweet little café", the "little" modifies only the café, and the whole (little) thing is sweet.

Neil Whitman took a look at the literature on adjective ordering, and sums up thus:

Linguists still do not have a definitive answer. What they do have is a hierarchy of adjective classes that (for whatever reason) occurs in a more-or-less fixed order in English. The order is fixed in other languages, too, though not all, and it's not quite the same order across languages. Here is a composite hierarchy I've assembled from those given in several sources I've looked at:

evaluation | size | shape | condition | human propensity | age | color | origin | material | attributive noun

I'd take "sweet" as an "evaluation", and so my wife's and my intuition line up with the literature here. But what if you tried to fill in each slot? "The sweet little square run-down laid-back old red Dominican brick corner café" makes rough sense, but I think I'd prefer "the sweet little square run-down laid-back old red-brick Dominican corner café", partly because I want the "red" and the "brick" to go together. Other orders might also make sense, depending on what you want to emphasise. So Mr Whitman's findings are more probabilities than rules. But the probabilities are sometimes pretty strong.

Since it really was sweet, I'll probably keep ordering coffee there, no matter how they order adjectives.