Logical Dimension
The logic of the group in English is recursive, based on successive subsets: working leftwards from the head, the first question that can be asked is "what kind of apples?" (Jonathon apples.) Then, "what kind of Jonathon apples?" (Shiny Jonathon apples.) "What kind of shiny Jonathon apples?" (Beautiful shiny Jonathon apples) "What kind of beautiful shiny Jonathon apples?" (Here the recursive logic changes, since this is a multivariate, not a univariate, nominal group—the question now is "How many beautiful shiny Jonathon apples?" and after that, "How do those five beautiful shiny Jonathon apples relate to me the speaker/writer, now?" ("Those ones".) In contrast, the logical questions of a univariate group would be unchanged right through, typical of long strings of nouns in news headlines and signage ("International departure lounge ladies' first-class washroom").
Read more about this topic: Nominal Group (functional Grammar)
Famous quotes containing the words logical and/or dimension:
“Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.”
—Kenneth MacKenzie Clark, Baron of Saltwood (1903–1983)
“Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)