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Got to musing about this a day or two ago, and as usual it was over someone saying "a hot cup of coffee" when they meant "a cup of hot coffee". As usually clarified, you don't care about the temperature of the cup, and in fact you'd probably like at least some part of the cup cool enough to allow you to hold it.
You can do this with "hot", but other descriptive terms aren't so clear. "A sweetened cup of coffee" might slip by, and maybe even "a strong cup of coffee", but you wouldn't ask for "an Arabian cup of coffee" unless you were interested in a particular kind of porcelain.
I know there are rules spelled out regarding what order multiple adjectives can appear in (you can speak of "a small red wooden boat" but not "a wooden small red boat"), but do these rules have any bearing on whether a term can be transferred as "hot" above?
I await with interest the response of a loyal group of small listeners.
Reference for ESLers, here's the "standard" guide for adjective order from the Cambridge Dictionary:
# adjective category (example)
1. opinion (e.g., unusual)
2. size (e.g., large)
3. physical quality (e.g., rough)
4. shape (e.g., round)
5. age (e.g., old)
6. color (blue ... NO! Green!)
7. origin (foreign)
8. material (porcelain)
9. type (universal)
10. purpose (e.g., flattening)
So "A cup of hot coffee" makes perfect sense, though I also hear "A hot cup of coffee" quite often. Since "hot" modifies "coffee" and not "cup" the former example is quite clearly the correct one. But that's obviously a prescriptivist answer. Being a descriptivist I can tolerate "A hot cup of coffee."
IMHO what's happening here is that "cup of coffee" has almost attained the status of a "noun phrase." Coffee is such a universal indulgence, and it almost always comes in a cup (sure, it comes in a thermos sometimes), that we treat it like a single entity. Same thing with "cold glass of water" or "satisfying shot of whiskey." So it makes sense to put the adjective in front of the "noun phrase" (though technically I believe that's a prepositional phrase).
Not like descriptivists need a logical explanation for usage, but that's my take.
And the British have always loved their cure-all "nice cup of tea" so nice definitely modifies the entire noun-phrase "cup of tea" (often even jokingly abbreviated to a 'cuppa' as in "I'll have a cuppa". If one were to say a "cup of nice tea" then it would somehow be drawing attention to the type of tea used, maybe a fancy new flavoured sort.
I think they also say "hot cup of tea"but I'm not sure about that (it's almost axiomatic, of course, since tea has to be extremely hot for the Brits to enjoy it - even to the point of having to warm up the teapot first by pouring hot water in it and then emptying it out to add the boiling water for the tea).
My friend complimented her taco salad, 'What a delicious looking bowl of salad!' But she didn't know what her intuitive self's talking about until she kept on munching the tortillas container, leaving the salad for last.
Sometimes you arbitrarily award the attribute to the content: brave heart, bless her heart, a tender soul, a flighty spirit- seems pretty unfair to the container.
But muscle shirt wearer is still muscular in it, right? ( Like the coffee is hot in the hot cup. ) Or maybe you have in mind Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon doing the "pump you up" thing. But those guys were not really muscular without the fake costumes.
I have in mind where the body part is so but becomes not so once the garment is put on, as if the garment steals the attribute. Hint: lady's garment, maybe most popular in the 1970s.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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