Expressing a NP with two adjectives

[DavidShan]

Good day.

Can anyone tell me how do I draw tree diagram for a NP with two adjectives, such as 'these sly little slivers'? I know it consists of a Det, AdjP (pre-head modifier), and N (head), but I'm not sure how to express the two adjectives under the AdjP.

Cheers

[panini]

When you say "under the AdjP", are you assuming there is a unique AdjP?

[DavidShan]

Sorry I don't quite understand what do you mean. Do you mean there can be two AdjP?

Like  Det+AdjP (pre-head modifier)+AdjP (pre-head modifier) + N (head)?

[panini]

Yes. So what tree are you assuming for the NP?

[Copernicus]

The NP is ambiguous, so you need at least two different senses:

• slivers that are both sly and little
• little slivers that are sly

Therefore, I would assign it at least two different parse structures.  Without getting into the complications of labelled constituents and traces, it would have roughly the following groupings:

• (the (((sly i) (little i)) slivers_i)
• (the (sly (little slivers)))

But the actual tree structure would depend on which type of constituent notation and which syntactic theory you are working with.

[panini]

The NP is ambiguous, so you need at least two different senses:

• slivers that are both sly and little
• little slivers that are sly

I don't understand your claim that there is an ambiguity. With a conjunction ("old men and women") there is clearly an ambiguity in that old might have scope over "men" or "men and women", but I don't see any ambiguity in the slivers example. The OPs example has the obvious problem that slivers aren't alive, much less sentient, but if we substitute "linguists" for "slivers", then we get the situation where we are narrowing down the set of linguists referred to by identifying just those who are sly and little. That is, "little slivers that are sly" are in fact "slivers that are little" and "slivers that are sly", so "slivers that are both sly and little" refers to the same thing as "little slivers that are sly", and also "sly slivers that are little" and "slivers that are both little and sly".

Whether or not you use a binary parse or a flat parse is strictly a matter of metatheoretical choice.

[Copernicus]

Sorry about that, panini.   Lacking an interpretive context, I was assuming that you might want to treat the second adjective as neutrally falling inside or outside the scope of the preceding adjective.  That seems like a plausible ambiguity to me in some contexts, but I admit that it is strained.  The question of whether slivers are alive is a common sense interpretation, so you clearly want to simplify the parse structure on the basis of pragmatic considerations.  Hence, I'll just offer #2 as the most plausible way to parse the structure, especially since "sly little" fits well together as a collocation--"nice/sly/good/tricky/nasty/etc. little <nominal>".