Before or after the noun: where do French adjectives go?

In French, the adjective usually follows the noun: 71.9 % of the 15,324 attributive adjectives in a press corpus analysed by Thuilier, Fox and Crabbé in 2010. In spoken French, however, Christophe Benzitoun found only 52 % in 2014. A very short list of adjectives decides nearly every doubtful case.

Where does the adjective go in French?

The default is after the noun. In the study by Juliette Thuilier, Gwendoline Fox and Benoît Crabbé on the French Treebank, a journalistic corpus, 11,015 of 15,324 attributive adjectives follow the noun, or 71.9 %, against 4,309 before it, or 28.1 %.

The Vitrine linguistique of the Office québécois de la langue française separates two kinds of adjective. The qualifying one expresses a quality or a flaw and takes either position depending on the case: "un hiver interminable", but "un gros fumeur". The classifying one assigns the noun to a category and is equivalent to a complement with "de": it always comes after the noun, "les fermes bovines", "le réseau routier".

The figures bear this out: adjectives of nationality are placed before the noun only once in 1,755 occurrences, colour adjectives follow it in 63 cases out of 63, and adjectives derived from a noun or a verb, such as "routier", move forward in only 8.5 % of cases. If your adjective states origin, colour, material or category, it goes after.

For an English speaker this is the opposite of instinct, since English puts almost every adjective first, "a red car". The habit to build is pushing the adjective back, "une voiture rouge". Nothing in English warns you either that moving a French adjective can change its meaning and not merely the style.

Which French adjectives come before the noun?

Statistics point to a very small group. Of the 1,993 distinct adjectives in the press corpus, only 123 are always placed first, or 6.2 %, and 1,684 always follow, or 84.5 %. That leaves 186 adjectives, 9.3 % of the list, which accept both positions, and these are the ones that matter: on their own they account for 5,718 occurrences, 37.3 % of the total, two thirds of them before the noun. Fewer than one adjective in ten therefore decides more than a third of all cases, and the general rule is no help exactly where you hesitate.

The handout by Sylvie Auger for the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières gives the short list: "bon" and "mauvais", "beau" and "joli", "petit", "grand" and "gros", "double" and "demi", "nouveau", "jeune" and "vieux", "autre" and "même". Numbers come first too, as do "premier", "dernier" and "prochain" when they mark rank in a series.

The same handout flags the cases where position changes meaning. "Un très grand homme" is about merit, "un homme très grand" about height. "Mon ancien immeuble" is my previous building, "un immeuble ancien" is an old one. "Un curieux voisin" is an odd neighbour, "un voisin curieux" a nosy one. Before the noun, "grand", "petit" and "vieux" often carry a sense of quantity: "un grand voyageur" travels a lot, "un vieux client" has been a customer for years.

Why do short adjectives move in front of the noun?

Because length weighs heavily, and the corpus measures it: adjectives of fewer than two syllables come first in 72.0 % of cases, two-syllable ones in 36.7 %, longer ones in only 7.4 %. The tipping point sits around two syllables. Frequency pulls the same way, common words also being the shortest, and Sylvie Auger notes this independently.

The authors measured what those two clues are worth: a model using nothing but length and frequency predicts 80.7 % of choices, against 71.9 % for the blanket reflex "always after the noun", and 91.8 % once each adjective's own preference is added. Two simple cues therefore take you a long way towards real usage.

What does spoken French change?

A great deal. Christophe Benzitoun, of the ATILF, reopened the question on roughly 2.3 million words of spoken corpora. Across 33,397 attributive adjectives he counts 17,360 placed after the noun, or 52 %, against 16,037 before it, or 48 %. The gap with the press is wide: 72 % postposition in journalistic writing, 52 % in speech.

Some adjectives switch sides depending on the genre. "Puissant" is systematically placed after the noun in the spoken corpus, while it is mostly placed before it in the press corpus, at 58.1 %. "Important" comes first in 3.2 % of spoken cases against 30.6 % in the press, and "actuel" in 1.5 % against 23.6 %. Double-position adjectives also weigh more in speech, 57.3 % of occurrences against 37.3 % in the press, the commonest being "petit", "autre" and "grand". So if your aim is to speak, that short list deserves more attention than the general rule.

What these figures do not tell you

First, all these percentages are shares of recorded occurrences, not of distinct adjectives and still less of speakers: 71.9 % does not mean that 71.9 % of French adjectives follow the noun, but that 71.9 % of observed uses do, and a handful of very frequent adjectives is enough to shift that number.

Second, the gap between 72 % and 52 % is not a contradiction. Benzitoun explains it himself: earlier work rested on written material, press or literature, where style weighs heavily. Both corpora cover the same French and differ only in genre, so the gap measures the effect of register. If you are writing carefully, the press model is the right one; if you are speaking, the other is.

Finally, no theory covers every adjective in every context, as Benzitoun points out citing the literature, and both studies measure what native speakers do, not what a learner should do. Where both positions are available, no rule settles the matter, only an effect of meaning to be judged.

What decides then is the effect your sentence has on the person listening, and nobody can report that to you from a book. Frenchee teachers are qualified native speakers, classes are live, one to one or in small groups of three to five, with no subscription: enough to try "un curieux voisin" and then "un voisin curieux" and hear the difference. The level test takes a few minutes, and our articles on noun gender, on the preposition before a place name, on the most common grammar mistakes and on starting from scratch go well with this one.

Sources

• Juliette Thuilier, Gwendoline Fox and Benoît Crabbé, "Fréquence, longueur et préférences lexicales dans le choix de la position de l'adjectif épithète en français", Congrès mondial de linguistique française 2010.
• Christophe Benzitoun, "La place de l'adjectif épithète en français : ce que nous apprennent les corpus oraux", Congrès mondial de linguistique française 2014.
• Office québécois de la langue française, Vitrine linguistique, L'adjectif et le groupe adjectival.