"The great late Alphonse Capone"

Donald Trump's recent West Point commencement address has gotten plenty of media coverage. But what I noticed was something linguistic, which the commentariat unsurprisingly ignored, namely a violation of expected modifier order (in a passage around 45:46 in the cited recording):

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I went through a very tough time with some very radicalized sick people and I say I was investigated more than the great late Alphonse Capone. Alphonse Capone was a monster he was a very hardened criminal I went through more investigations than Alphonse Capone and now I'm talking to you as president can you believe this can you believe it

The order of modifiers in "the great late Alphonse Capone" violated my word-order expectations. Trump's 700-msec pauses after "great" and "late" indicate that this was probably a matter of compositional processing rather than grammatical preference. But still, it made me wonder whether my preferences are valid in this case — and if so, what explains them.

A quick check of Mark Davies' NOW corpus confirms that (raw and superficial) usage counts agree with me: 4,320 instances of "late great" versus 416 instances of "great late". And in fact the corpus evidence is stronger than that, since a large fraction of the "great late" examples are things like these:

McGowan's of Phibsborough throws a great late night party. This is great late 1960s 007 balladry.  It is a great late summer addition to your garden.

So why the judgment that late should precede great in "the late great Al Capone"?

Of course, this is just a specific instance of a much larger problem. "Big bad modifier order" (9/4/2016) lists a number of attempts at a general explanation, including Mark Forsyth's exploration of Hyperbaton:

[A]djectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.

For a more recent (and open-access) review, see Gregory Scontras, "Adjective ordering across languages." Annual Review of Linguistics 2023 — and the articles that Google Scholar lists as citing it, including vibe-aware things like Richard Futrell and Kyle Mahowald's "How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models".

But I haven't found any direct discussion of "late great" vs. "great late", nor any generalization that obviously applies — though some readers will likely be able to do better.

And there are some hints that other dimensions produce different preferences, for example by substituting "recently-deceased" for "late".

There's also the question of generalization across languages. What about French "le regretté grand X" vs. "le grand regretté X", or Spanish "el fallecido gran X" vs. "el gran fallecido X", or the equivalent choices in Italian, Mandarin, Japanese, Hindi, etc.?