Italian Adjective Order Is Not Predicted by Syntactic Hierarchies and Movement

Speakers have robust preferences for the relative order of adjectives when multiple adjectives modify a noun (e.g., big blue box vs. blue big box; see Scontras 2023 for an overview). Here we investigate adjective ordering in Italian, a language with postnominal adjectives that also allows for noun-medial ANA configurations. We present two experiments on Italian AAN, ANA, and NAA orders. We find strong ordering preferences in the ANA template but weaker preferences for NAA; our results are especially problematic for the idea that NAA can be derived cross-linguistically on the basis of movement from an underlying AAN structure.