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This question from earlier today quotes the following from Guy de Maupassant (redacted):

Toutes ces personnes […] forment un être spécial, doué […] d’une manière de penser nouvelle …

The order of the prepositional phrase (PP) and the adjective in the bolded bit struck me here. It makes semantic sense for nouvelle ‘new’ to modify manière de penser ‘way of thinking’, and therefore follow it… but I would still instinctively find une manière nouvelle de penser more natural.

In English, at least, adjectives are somehow ‘closer’ to the nouns they modify than PPs (even though it’s harder to test for in English, where adjectives pre-modify and PPs post-modify), but does the same hold true in French – or is it perhaps even the exact opposite in French?

Googling gives about 60 hits for Maupassant’s variant, 13,000 (estimated) for mine, which might indicate that my gut instinct was not fully wrong, at least. Unfortunately, most of those 13,000 seemed to have objects after penser and thus were not actually relevant examples (see section at bottom).

Substituting a less verby example, I tried comparing phrases chaussures blanches de tennis with chaussures de tennis blanches, and again found that both seem to be used (though not much), this time in more equal measures: 10 results for the former, 22 for the latter.

Trying to find any actual references for how such noun phrases are/should be structured has turned up nothing, so I now turn to SE to find an answer.

Questions

  1. Is one or the other of the orders N PP Adj and N Adj PP significantly more natural and common in current French, or prescriptively considered more ‘correct’? If so, which one?
  2. If N PP Adj is indeed generally more common, were preferences perhaps different earlier (i.e., does the Guy de Maupassant example feel old-timey now, but would have been normal back then)?
  3. If there is no significant different in naturalness or frequency, is there a particular difference in meaning between the two? (Apart from potential ambiguity; see below.)

Constraints

Of course, not every sentence is made equal. There are a number of features which will inevitably make one construction far more likely than the other, such as:

  • If one of the modifying phrases is very heavy and the other isn’t, the lighter will virtually always be placed closest to the noun.
    Examples: if the PP contains a verb with an adverb or object (“une manière nouvelle de penser la pratique photographique”), or if there are multiple adjectives (“une manière de penser nouvelle, commune” – as @None points out in a comment, that is in fact what the Maupassant quote says; I’d missed the second adjective originally)

  • If either N+PP or N+Adj collocate very strongly, they are less likely to be split up, as they are tight-knit enough to essentially form a single word (semantically, not morphologically).
    Example: le quart d’heure académique would presumably never be phrased as *le quart académique d’heure, since quart d’heure is, for present purposes, a single word

  • If it’s ambiguous what the adjective modifies and its position can disambiguate.
    Example: institut de l’art moderne might refer to a modern institute or to modern art, but institut moderne de l’art unambiguously means the former

  • If the adjective belongs to the small group of adjectives which can be placed either before or after the noun with no change in meaning, avoiding a ‘pile-up’ after the noun by placing the adjective before it is often the most natural choice.
    Example: une nouvelle manière de penser is in fact by far the most common variant

So for the sake of this question, assume we’re only talking about cases where a noun is loosely modified by a simple PP (simple preposition + noun) and a single non-preposable adjective.

Janus Bahs Jacquet
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  • I would have said that manière de penser nouvelle sounded better. But 10 to 22 seems to indicate that usage prefers chaussures de tennis blanches twice as much, not that they are equally likely, IMO. – Frank Sep 26 '23 at 01:36
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    @Frank With such small numbers (and the unreliability of Google hit counts in general), I don’t want to overstate what the numbers mean. I was surprised there were so few hits, actually – even English ‘white tennis shoes’ only gives about 60 hits, which seems bafflingly low. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 26 '23 at 02:24
  • Indeed. Very small numbers. Strange. – Frank Sep 26 '23 at 02:57
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    In that particular case, we can't separate the fragment you quote from the rest of the sentence and the fact that the two adjectives (nouvelle, commune) are juxtaposed. In my opinion if the two are separated the meaning is different, so having nouvelle in a different place would imply more rewriting than what you suggest. Une manière nouvelle, commune or une manière nouvelle et commune de penser sound clumsy to my ears and Maupassant's sentence is much more balanced. – None Sep 26 '23 at 05:49
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    Food for thought: NGram – jlliagre Sep 26 '23 at 08:23
  • @JanusBahsJacquet you're forgetting Adj N PP which is also possible in a lot of these cases :) – guillaume31 Sep 26 '23 at 08:39
  • @guillaume31 Not forgetting, but that one (which matches English) isn’t really relevant because there’s no choice to be made there – the noun separates them, so the order is fixed in such cases (and it only works with a small selection of adjectives anyway). That’s why I didn’t include une nouvelle manière de penser, even though I did think it would probably be the most natural option of all here (as jlliagre’s Ngram seems to suggest is indeed the case). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 26 '23 at 09:22
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    @None You’re quite right – I’d actually completely missed that there was an extra adjective in the quote. That does make a lot of difference since, as you say, N Adj, Adj PP is clumsy, in the same way that N PP Adj is clumsy when the PP is too heavy – I’ll add an extra caveat about that. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 26 '23 at 09:27
  • @JanusBahsJacquet It only works with a small selection of adjectives is an objection you can make to all heuristics you will discover on that topic, I'm afraid. The list of exceptions will probably outweigh any rule you come up with. – guillaume31 Sep 26 '23 at 09:41
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    I would accept but never say des chaussures blanches de tennis. It sounds like an afterthought. In any case, I'd rather just say des tennis blanches. – jlliagre Sep 26 '23 at 10:21
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    Similarly, une voiture de course rouge: ✅, une voiture rouge de course: ❓ – jlliagre Sep 26 '23 at 10:27
  • @jlliagre I actually thought I’d mentioned it somewhere (looks like I didn’t), but I kind of assumed that if the noun and PP collocate very strongly (i.e., basically create a single word), that would skew things. Voiture de course is one such case, being so tight-knit as to basically form a single word. Similarly, I would imagine that le quart d’heure académique would never realistically be *le quart académique d’heure (that sounds ridiculous even to me). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 26 '23 at 10:39
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Just saw this: https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/who-lusts-for-certainty-lusts-for-lies – Frank Sep 26 '23 at 15:15
  • @Frank Google NGrams certainly has flaws but Etymonline blatantly lies trying to make a point. – jlliagre Sep 26 '23 at 22:38
  • @jlliagre In what ways does it lie? – Frank Sep 27 '23 at 01:04
  • @Frank Ngram says toast almost vanishes from the English language by 1980, and then it pops back up. No, NGram doesn't say that. The author intentionally manipulated the Y axis to mislead readers. He did the very same trick with the first chart. – jlliagre Sep 27 '23 at 07:33
  • "vouvelle" is one of the few adjectives that may be found both before and after the noun. When PP is idiomatic, i.e. a well identified semantic group (voiture de course, chaussette de tennis, gateau de riz), the adjective will placed after PP (or before the noun). Similarily, when is a common expression, you will not separate the two words (le mari jaloux de mon amie). – Graffito Sep 27 '23 at 08:28
  • @jlliagre Right - the interpretation is the author's only, and the axis should show 0, but there is a 2X dip around 1980 - it's pretty visible. – Frank Sep 27 '23 at 13:34
  • @Frank The Y axis has been made up. Google NGrams graphics always start at 0. A 50% dip is not a ~100% dip and there is certainly a explanation about it. Said stayed within the same order-of-magnitude during the 20th century. An explanation of the variation is likely that the kind of documents scanned evolve along the years. Nothing that justify throwing the baby out with the bath water ;-) – jlliagre Sep 27 '23 at 13:55
  • @Frank yes, I agree about the axis. – Frank Sep 27 '23 at 14:29
  • @Janus Bahs Jacquet — “even English ‘white tennis shoes’ only gives about 60 hits, which seems bafflingly low”.Google hits can be very misleading. Just now, I got 71 hits using that string, whereas adding ‘site:edu’ gave 145 hits. – Segorian Sep 27 '23 at 15:37
  • I believe it depends of the importance of the PP. In the example you cite, manière de penser the PP is critical to precise the meaning. It is then awkward to put the Adj in the middle. You could put it in front, but putting it at the end is more elegant since that's the point you want to stress. Same, tennis is critical for the understanding and should be just after chaussures. Blanches is then at the end, except if you want to appear grandiloquent. – Hugues Nov 13 '23 at 03:18

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