Adjective order with dead & pregnant
I have just listened to a presentation to adjective order in my linguistics class, however, it failed to answer my question. Would an English speaker say "this is a dead pregnant cat" or "this is a pregnant dead cat." Why would one be better than the other?
Well, I guess it's Hallowe'en...
This would be written as
This is a dead pregnant cat.
The nuance of this is that the attributes are parsed in reverse chronological order, or backwards from the noun.
This is a cat.
This is a pregnant cat.
This is a dead pregnant cat.
Which implies the cat got pregnant before it got dead. If you were to write it the other way, the meaning is changed to imply that a dead cat somehow got pregnant.