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From what is introduced here, "recent" is a kind of age and "deleted" seems to be a kind of specific opinion, so this structure seems to be correct: "deleted recent questions".

Actually I was looking at my questions in my Stack Overflow profile and saw this link at the bottom of the page: "deleted recent questions". According to what is mentioned above, this is grammatically correct, but has a misleading meaning to me. It means to me:

The questions which where posted recently and are deleted.

It means to me in this way because of the adjectives order. In fact I think the word "deleted" is an adjective for the adjective-plus-noun "recent questions".

However, it is indeed aimed to mean:

The questions which were recently deleted. (regardless of the time the question was posted)

To mean so, I think this structure is preferable: "recent deleted questions".

Now my questions:

  1. Are my statements above correct?
  2. If yes, could we use the structure "recent deleted questions" or we are forced to use something like "recently deleted questions" ?
  3. Does English grammar have specific rules for what I call "adjective for a adjective-plus-noun", or the adjectives order indicated in the provided link should always be considered?
Aliweb
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    'Recent deleted questions' doesn't sound appropriate to me, as 'deletedquestions' would not normally be described as recent. 'Recent dead people'? // 'Deleted recent questions' is fine: they were asked recently and deleted even more recently. 'Recently deleted questions' is indeed the way to specify questions of any vintage that have been recently deleted. – Edwin Ashworth Nov 03 '14 at 19:46
  • You say: "they were asked recently and deleted even more recently". but they are not necessarily asked recently. It is possible that they were asked a long time ago. – Aliweb Nov 03 '14 at 19:52
  • 'Deleted recent questions' can only have the sense I state. – Edwin Ashworth Nov 03 '14 at 19:54
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    @ali: No, deleted recent questions were asked recently. Otherwise they would not be recent questions. If they were asked a long time ago, they are not recent questions, but possibly they are recently deleted questions. – oerkelens Nov 03 '14 at 19:55
  • @oerkelens: So you agree with my statements? If so, Could you provide answer for my questions? – Aliweb Nov 03 '14 at 19:58
  • @EdwinAshworth: Is this rule correct for all possible examples? I'm actually asking about my third question. – Aliweb Nov 03 '14 at 20:01
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    That is too broad a question for this forum, but has already been partially (and pretty thoroughly) addressed at the What is the rule for adjective order?. A further complication here is that a deleted passage etc is arguably no longer a passage; non-semantically-predicative ('this president is former') adjectives are tricky. – Edwin Ashworth Nov 03 '14 at 20:14
  • @ali I agreed with Edwin's comment, and disagreed with your reaction to that. – oerkelens Nov 03 '14 at 21:44

3 Answers3

1

I would use an adverb instead of an adjective and say "recently deleted questions" for questions that were deleted recently, and "deleted recent questions" referring to recent questions that have been deleted.

Centaurus
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  • Well I am asking about the possibilities in order of adjectives in such situations. I know we can use adverbs ... – Aliweb Nov 04 '14 at 14:43
  • @ali I understand but I would never say "recent deleted". I would go for an adverb instead. :) – Centaurus Nov 04 '14 at 15:10
0

Adjectives are technically supposed to be ordered like this: Quantity, Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material, Purpose.

You can see more here: http://www.learnenglish.de/grammar/adjectiveorder.html

akorff
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  1. Yes, your statements are correct.

  2. The problem here appears to be the nature of the term "deleted." While it can be classed as a sort of opinion, states of existence function in the human psyche more like physical attributes such as shape and color, which necessarily follow closer to the noun in adjective orders. So "deleted recent questions" is strictly correct, but for matters of understanding adjectives further from the noun treat adjectives closer to the noun as part of the noun complex, so "recent deleted questions" is lucidly correct. (Sidenote: I read a text long ago where someone posited that adjective lists happened as a result of speakers willy-nilly dropping pieces of clauses or hyphenated phrases, so "deleted recent questions" would theoretically have come from "deleted-in-recent-times questions," but that seems like an abominable stretch.)

  3. Not to my personal knowledge (Oxford, MLA, APA, Chicago, and so on), but I once had a professor scold me for using adjectives that could be mistaken for verbs by our pronoun-eliding culture, especially if in the first place of an adjective list. "Deleted" in "deleted recent questions" appears to be one of these, so I have to assume by experience that it is bad form to use a squinting adjective in front of an adjective-plus-noun noun complex.

SRunner
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