Putting a comma between sequential adjectives is not done when the adjectives reflect entirely unrelated qualities. Here's how OXFORD DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN USAGE AND STYLE explains it: "Coordinate Adjectives. When two adjectives, both modifying the same noun, are related in sense, they should be separated by a comma (or else an and) ... But when the consecutive adjectives are unrelated, there shouldn't be a comma." In the "typical American" example, when both these words are being used as adjectives--e.g., "a typical American idea"--there is no comma necessary to separate "typical" from "American," because these two adjectives not only mean totally different things, those things aren't even related to one another in meaning. An example of adjectives that are related in sense would be: "The stunning, beautiful starlet stepped onto the red carpet." ("Stunning" is a word that's related to "beautiful" in sense.) He wore an impeccable, well-pressed suit. So you're saying two subtly or slightly--but not DISTINCTLY--different things about the noun, usually to underscore a point or its significance. There will be ambiguities sometimes, and that usually means either a comma is necessary (to avoid the ambiguity) or a rewrite (to avoid redundency).
Thanks for your detailed explanation. But your explanation is a little bit difficult for me, a dumb learner, to understand. I have never seen hyphenated "typical-something..." or "typical, adjective..." with a comma inserted between. Just now I consulted my Oxford dictionary and Longman dictionary and got "a typical Italian cafe" in Oxford on p. 1909 and "a typical British summer"in Longman on p.1561. You can easily see that they are different from your constructions. Are these two authoritative dictionaries both wrong about how to use "typical"? It seems not. I also googled "typical American" and "typically American" a moment ago and I got 33,300,000 search results for "typical American" and 60,200,000 search results for "typically American". I admit that it is beyond my ability to decide which search result is something by a native speaker of English and which one is by a nonnative. But I browsed the first few pages of seach results for either of the two (It is impossible to read all the web pages of the abstracts of search results) and found that none of them has expressions like "a typical, American family" and "a typical-American diet". It can't be that all those nonnative and native writers are wrong about how to properly construct such expressions. Please do not feel offended, but I'm afraid you are over-thinking about this issue.
I am afraid you are a bit naive about just how much poor grammar there is in the general population. Hardly a day goes by that I don't roll my eyes at something said by a newscaster or reporter, and these are people with degrees in Communications.
That's because it's completely wrong. . . and that's the point I was trying to make. That's because it's an awkward structure, and apt to confuse a reader rolleyes even if it is grammatically correct. Those contructions in my post weren't mine. . . I expanded on what the poster above me was trying to explain. Please see Cogito's post in this thread (his second one) on coordinate and non-coordinate adjectives: https://www.writingforums.org/showthread.php?t=26226 "a typical British summer." Typical and British are noncoordinate adjectives. They are not interchangeable. If you said, "a british, typical summer," it would change the meaning entirely. Look back on the old example: "A typical American way of thinking." "Typical" and "American" are coordinate modifiers, which modify the "thinking" noun. If you swap those words around, the sentence means the same thing. Coordinate modifiers also require a comma between them. So. . . we could write "A typical, American way of thinking" or "An American, typical way of thinking" and the sentence would mean the same thing. And yes, it's a lousy sentence, even after fixing the punctuation. Just plain awkward. That's why you don't and probably won't ever see that structure (two coordinate adjectives) in the dictionary when you look up "typical". . . You may be confused because you see "way of thinking" as the noun, and "American" as the noncoordinate modifier. But a noun is one word, not three. . . If the noun doesn't immediately follow the modifier, then the modifier can't be noncoordinate. So let's get rid of those three clunky words and replace them with one. "Typical American logic." Hooray! Now we have a clear noun (logic) and a noncoordinate modifier for it (American). Now we can drop that pesky comma, too. And best of all, the phrase makes perfect sense. Inefficient phrasing just screwed up the whole original sentence. I'm sorry, but that doesn't mean anything whatsoever. Both are 100% correct and common and both have distinctly different individual uses. . . Well, that's good. The former is awkward and the latter is just dead wrong. Edit: And by the way.... "A typical American family" would be perfectly fine (and should be written) without a comma. Why? I already explained it. In this case, "American" is the noncoordinate modifier of the noun "family". That means no comma. . . unless you actually desire the change in meaning a comma would bring. . . In that case, the comma version is awkward and clumsy and should be rephrased, despite being correct. /Edit No worries. I don't get offended. And please don't be offended yourself, but I'm afraid you misunderstood my post. I blame myself for that. I'm a terrible teacher. But you know what they say about practice. . . and I'm nothing if not determined.
Is it again the prescriptive/descriptive conflict? But it is impossible for me a nonnative speaker of English to use something which I have never come across in my reading and to choose not to use something which I repeatedly encounter in my readings. To my understanding, we do not lack things in life which many people gradually get accustomed to but which are not so desirable at first.However, as time passes by, they may become new standards. The split infinitive perhaps is a good example.Furthermore, if I am taking an English test, I dare not write "a typical-American family" or "a typical, Italian diet" as the marker of my test paper may view them as incorrect English. See, I will be in an impossible situation!
That's because the first would be incorrect, and the second would also be incorrect if you meant to say the diet were typical of Italians. . . I explained it in full in my last post. I don't think I can do any better if you still don't get it.
'shucks' is typical American courage and confidence in action is typical American [the can do] enormous portions in Macdonald's is typical American typical American is a way of living, being, talking that's why google recognises half a million such uses; we should move with the times and loosen up..the important thing is not to inflame base motives through our writing.. enjoy I am a great believer in and true admirer of typical American and I have no anxieties about the standard of my English.
Really, you made a google query that discludes all the valid uses of "typical american + noun"? Or the cases where "american" was used as a noun with a determiner? No one is saying that you can't use "typical american", but I have never heard anyone use it the way you do in the above sentences. I'm a big believer in moving with the times in language change but I've never heard "typical American" used like that.
You said something great. Thanks. Language is something that most people use and whether you like it or not, nowadays "gay" is not used just to mean "happy and full of fun" (now in the dictionary this use is marked with "old-fashioned"!) and "cool" can be used to mean something other than "not hot or warm". If more and more people say "This is a typical American way of thinking", I will simply follow suit, rather than using "This is a typically American way of thinking." or "This is a typical-American way of thinking." or "This is a typical, American way of thinking." or whatever.
But Kas said we should say either "a typical, American way of thinking" or "a typical-American way of thinking". And Kas added that " 'typical American' sounds like something a non-native might say. . . Just clunky, awkward and grammatically wrong. . . and it doesn't make sense."
I agree that Kas's reasoning is sensible, but the problem is whether most people write "a typical, American way of thinking" or "a typical-American way of thinking". If people never write these two expressions in their writings, then it seems we do not have to think so deeply about this issue.
That's not what I said. . . but I'm not going to argue. Molly and richard, please read this: All three of those sentences are crap. You should write it as "typical American logic" or replace logic with a suitable noun, as I said before. . .
The same thing happens over here in China. It seems that we have no other choice but to learn to be more tolerant. If you denounce them, they will rebut you saying you are old-fashioned. Actually it is them who are talking unintelligibly, but finally they point the finger at you and say you are talking nonsense or they simply pay no attention to whatever you are saying. This is perhaps about how language evolves.
Wouldn't it be cast-iron pot? Or is the hyphen not manditory because there is no confusion without it? As there would be confusion with old furniture salesman vs old-furniture salesman.
You said: Or the cases where "american" was used as a noun with a determiner? My reply: No. In "a typical American holiday", as I understand it, this "American" is not a noun. You said: No one is saying that you can't use "typical american", but I have never heard anyone use it the way you do in the above sentences. My reply: I have read a lot of "typical American+noun" in Typical Americanby Gish Jen, an American novelist and in many online article. I asked the question of whether it is that expressions like "a typically American way of thinking" are shortened to "a typical American way of thinking" for the sake of convenience (easier to pronounce, using fewer syllable or whatsoever). I am sorry to tell you that you misunderstood me. You said: I'm a big believer in moving with the times in language change but I've never heard "typical American" used like that. My reply: As I repeatedly said in my posts, many native speakers use "a typical American + noun". And if you search for it via google, you will have numerous search results.
Richard, I was replying to Roger, not you. He was using the following examples: 'shucks' is typical American courage and confidence in action is typical American [...] Which I think are ungrammatical (see below). So, I was agreeing with you, but in case you don't understand my point I will clarify below. You are correct. In my post, you must have missed the sentence immediately preceding what you quoted. I stated the case of "typical American + NOUN", which means using "American" as an adjective, not as a noun. I clearly said in lots of cases you can use "typical American + noun". Did you read my previous posts? In his examples he was using "typical American" as a predicate adjective (predicate adjectives are attached using the copula, AFTER the head noun) EG: The NOUN is PREDICATE ADJECTIVE. EG. 'shucks' is typical American rather than as attributive adjectives (attributive adjectives appear immediately before the noun) EG: The ATTRIBUTIVE ADJECTIVES NOUN... EG: The typical American 'shucks' is... That is what I was objecting to. The use of "typical American" as coordinate adjectives is fine, but not as a predicate adjective. In that case, I did mis-understand your initial post, just as you mis-understood my previous post. I thought you were asking if the form "typical" were derived from "typically". Generally speaking, it is not, it's the reverse: "typicall" is derived from "typical". I don't know if people are using "typical" as an adverb (to take the place of typically) or if they are in fact just using it adjectivaly. It could probably be researched, but the distinction is (as has been noted earlier) very subtle to determine. The test I guess would be to see if we can replace random adverbs with "typical". My feeling is that you can't.
There is for sure a difference between "old furniture salesman" and "old-furniture salesman". But it is funny to construe "a typical American diet" as "a typical diet which happens to be American". And I have never seen anyone write "a typical-American diet".
"A typical American diet" is correct. You will need to understand the difference between coordinate adjectives and non-coordinate adjectives in order to understand why. The meaning and construction of a double-adjective sentence changes depending on whether the adjectives are coordinate or non-coordinate. I'm sorry, but until you understand the mechanics involved, you will probably continue to misinterpret everything we're saying, and only grow more confused. If you don't understand Cogito's explanation (which I quoted above), please do a google search on "coordinate vs non-coordinate adjectives". Copy and paste that into the search. This is the key to understanding the entire discussion.
Hi,guys. Please address these two simple questions directly: Which one(s) do you, a native speakers of English, use in your conversations or writing, "a typical American way of thinking", "a typically American way of thinking", "a typical, American way of thinking" or "a typical-American way of thinking"? Is "a typical American way of thinking" really different in meaning from "a typically American way of thinking" or is it that natives tend to use "a typical American way of thinking" instead of "a typically American way of thinking" for the sake of convenience? Please answer the above two questions directly. I beg you not to give me any more grammar rules concerning this issue, which may easily frighten me. It is your linguistic intuition which I rely on, rather than those too complicated theories. Forgive me for being straightforward. Thanks. Richard
I wouldn't use any of them, but if I had to pick one: "A typically American way of thinking." Yes. People say that because the masses are poorly educated and English is a complicated language. They don't know any better and they usually don't care. They don't care because they're not writers and they don't need to have good English skills. If you are taking English courses, teaching English, or writing professionally in English, then you do good English skills. To do any of those things well, you need much better English than the majoriy of natives have. Nobody will ever look down on you for speaking correctly. Some people will judge you uneducated, ignorant, or even less intelligent for using poor grammar.
I would agree with Kas that they are different. However, I would say that they just have different uses as explained above, that are, however, very close. Most people probably don't consciously notice the slight differences in connotation, and sue them interchangeably. As I said in my last post, maybe people do use "typical American" as a short form of "typically American", but you'd need to do some corpus research. I don't doubt that they do, since they are both correct forms with not immediately obvious differences to the layman.
Thanks for your replies to my questions and your enlightening advice. I now get what I was so eager to get. What I want to add here is that it seems that it is beyond many nonnative learners of English to always go to such a depth to explore every language problem that confronts them. I mean, there are so many problems to deal with if we nonnatives desire to express ourselves accurately. Perhaps it is difficult for you native speakers to assess the difficulty involved in this process. There's the difference between your thinking patterns and ours, sentence pattern choice, diction, translation of unique things which are deeply rooted in the source culture but which has no counterpart in the target language, style, and so on and so forth, to deal with. Certainly I am not trying to find an excuse for not going all out to achieve a better result. I am an English writing teacher, so, besides the problems I mentioned, I have to teach my students how to generate ideas for their essays, which is no less challenging than those above-mentioned issues. Nevertheless, I am eager to learn more about English although I may sometimes appear to be dumb, and I am always happy to see my students and myself make progress. Finally, please answer this follow-up question: If you use none of "a typical American way of thinking", "a typically American way of thinking", "a typical, American way of thinking", and "a typical-American way of thinking", then what do you use instead? Thanks. Richard
Instead of "That's a typical American way of thinking," I would say, "That's typical American logic" or "That's a typical American ideal" or "That's a typical American conclusion" or "That's a typical American idea" or "That's a typical American thought" or "That's a typical American notion" or...... I hope you get the point. I would replace "way of thinking" with a noun, which would correct the sentence and say whatever it is I wanted to say more clearly and directly.
No one seemed to respond to this, so I shall respond: In the phrase, "A typically American Arrogance," the word 'typically' is describing American, whereas in the phrase, "A typical American Arrogance," the word 'typical' is describing the word 'arrogance,' or the two words, 'American' AND 'arrogance' as one. (Since American is describing arrogance, typical is describing both as a whole, 'American arrogance'.) So in the first example, "A typically American arrogance," the impression is, "That's an arrogance that is typically (or, generally) American," whereas in the second, "A typical American arrogance," the implication is, "That American arrogance is typical." Therefore, one is speaking directly of the arrogance, and another is speaking directly of the thing that is arrogant. "That is arrogance," or, "That thing is arrogant". So really, one is saying that something that is arrogant in a particular fashion is usually American, whereas the other just ASSUMES that the arrogance is American, and then states that it is typical. Interesting. I actually comprehended it through explaining.
