Adjective may be more rigid in some languages than others; in some, like Spanish, it may only be a default ("unmarked") word order, with other orders being permissible. Other languages, such as Tagalog, follow their adjectival orders as rigidly as English. The normal adjectival order of English may be overridden in certain circumstances, especially when one adjective is being fronted. In addition, the usual order of adjectives in English would result in the phrase "the bad big wolf" (opinion before size), but instead the usual phrase is "the big bad wolf", perhaps because the ablaut reduplication rule that high vowels precede
Nominalized adjective elaborated by Noam Chomsky, it is suggested that inflected adjectives are more likely to be nominalized because they have overtly-marked φ-features (such as grammatical number and gender), which makes them suitable for use as the complement of a determiner. Determiners with unvalued φ-features must find a complement with a valued φ-feature to meet semantic comprehension. In the diagrams below, the determiner is "the", and its complement is either the noun phrase "poor people" or the nominalized adjective "poor". As the frequency of nominalized adjective use decreased, the frequency of structures using the prop-word "one" increased (phrases such as "the large"