Here are two lists of noun phrases containing attributive adjectives. Those in the first list could not easily have any kind of gradability associated with them, while those in the second could. 1 the general election a deliberate liar these strategic weapons its charitable status private foundations like the Gulbenkian a musical version of the play a wild animal a black mamba 2 a bitter denunciation an unrealistic proposal this important work its wistful charm the reassuring reports a musical personality these heavy stones this wild region The adjectives in list 1 cannot be treated as gradable: *very strategic weapons; *This election is the most general we have met with; *Foundations like the Gulbenkian are extremely private. There is no kind of election that is midway between being general and local. Thus, it makes no sense to say *a very general election unless by some feat of the imagination you can interpret the word general, in this context, as gradable. Adjectives like those in list 1, above, are classifying adjectives; elections are classified, and general is one of the classes. The classifications denoted are largely institutional—legal, military, academic, etc. Quite often people invent systems of classification for special uses, and employ ‘ordinary’ gradable adjectives for denoting these new classes. In a green-grocer’s shop the potatoes are either new or old and each kind has its own price; you cannot have ‘fairly new’ ones. Thus the difference between gradable and ungradable adjectives is not altogether a matter of knowing the properties of isolated words; one has to take the context into account as well. Noun phrases may contain several adjective modifiers. The patterns in which the adjectives occur when there is more than one can sometimes be fairly complex. We are not going to describe these patterns in much detail here. But it is of interest to note that the sequence: qualitative, colour, classifying, is the usual one as far as these three kinds are concerned: a large grey modern sculpture a charming tiled roof a small blue flower yellow oil-bound paint a strange granular texture The reader should try changing the sequence of the adjectives in these phrases and see what curious expressions result: a tiled charming roof,
etc.