It is an instinctive thing for native speakers of English to order adjectives in a certain way, but difficult to explain to non-native speakers. We might say ‘an attractive lawyer’, or ‘a female lawyer’ but when we put the two adjectives together we will say ‘an attractive female lawyer’ not ‘a female attractive lawyer’. It doesn’t matter which social class or region we come from, this is the way we say it.

The fun in grammar is not, in my view, about finding the differences in the way we speak and then saying one way is ‘right’ and another ‘wrong’, but in observing what we do and working out the way our language works, how it varies, changes and stubbornly follows ‘rules’ that we unconsciously follow.

It turns out (as I found out thanks to, once again, the Open University, module E303) that adjectives fall into categories: describers and classifiers. So, the word that classifies what type of noun it is, goes nearest to the noun, and words that describe, more subjectively, are further away. We might attend an important work meeting, but not a work important meeting.

Then if look further, we see that quantities take their place furthest from the noun, so we get ‘six attractive female lawyers’, and not, for instance, ‘female six attractive lawyers’. We will never see how blind three mice run.

But just to confuse you, the headline I put on this short little blog is deceptive. In fact, both new and brave are describers and could be interchangeable, it is just that we are so used to the phrase ‘brave new world’ since the novel by Aldous Huxley was published that it sounds odd the wrong way round. We could indeed say it’s a new, brave world we are entering, whereas we instinctively know that ‘blind three mice’ is a no-no.

The world of ‘real grammar’ is expanding now, with the aid of powerful software that can analyse millions of examples of what we actually write (or say, if transcribed) and uncover unsuspected patterns in the way we construct our sentences.

An unexpected favourite for me is the use of certain words with negative/positive ideas. Concordancing software revealed that the words ‘broadly’ and ‘largely’, which are synonymous, are used differently, broadly in a positive context and largely in a negative one. For example, ‘I am broadly in agreement with you whereas I find the other proposition to be largely unappealing’.

This tendency went unobserved by linguists, but the power of new tools is revealing hidden quirks of our language.

Who knew grammar could be interesting?