A noun can be preceded by a list consisting of several adjectives, each of which selects a nominal complement. This phenomenon is referred to as stacking:

Interestingly, stacking is characteristic of the attributive construction, and it is unusual in a predicative construction:

Coordination may also involve a list of several elements. Hence it could be supposed that stacking is related to coordination. It must be noted, however, that not every stacked construction can be converted into a coordination, as shown below:

It seems that coordination requires that both adjectives belong to the same semantic group. In the ungrammatical example, this is not the case: lytssmall is a set-denoting adjective and DútskGerman, with its geographical denotation, is a relational adjective. Two set-denoting adjectives can be coordinated:

It seems that coordination is semantically much more constrained than stacking. The order of stacked adjectives is not free, but correlates with the semantic type to which the adjective belongs. The following phrases illustrate that set-denoting adjectives precede relational adjectives:

The following sentences illustrate that evaluative adjectives precede relational adjectives:

The following sentences illustrate that evaluative adjectives precede set-denoting adjectives:

The following example contains an adjective of each the three semantic subgroups; any permutation of the three adjectives leads to a degraded result:

The following template subsumes the ordering restrictions holding between the three kinds of adjectives: Evaluative < Set-denoting < Relational. Within the class of set-denoting adjectives, subjective adjectives precede non-subjective ones:

Within the class of non-subjective set-denoting adjectives, context-dependent adjectives precede those which are independent of context:

The following template subsumes the ordering restrictions within the class of set-denoting adjectives: Subjective < Context-dependent < Context-independent.