I am supposed to write the small phrase, “A certain city (accusative) full of strife.”
I wrote., “πόλιν τινὰ τῆς πλήρης στάσεως.”
The answer book wrote,
“πόλιν τινὰ τῆς στάσεως πλήρης.”
I know Greek has a certain free word order, but is there any reason that the adjective is not between the article and noun?
Check the answer book again. It should be πόλιν τινὰ τῆς στάσεως πλήρη, not πλήρης.
πλήρη is accusative; πλήρης is nominative. You need to review and master the case endings for this category of adjective declension. That’s the point of this exercise.
πλήρη cannot be placed between τῆς and στάσεως. Only an adjective modifying στάσεως can fill that slot. And it would have to be genitive πλήρους in that case: πόλιν τινὰ τῆς πλήρους στάσεως, “a city of the full strife”, which might perhaps be possible Greek in some odd context, but out of context it’s rather strange.
Either πόλιν τινὰ τῆς στάσεως πλήρη or πόλιν τινὰ πλήρη τῆς στάσεως would be acceptable,. Putting τῆς στάσεως before πλήρη seems marginally better to me, at least, because the genitive complement of πλήρη, i.e., τῆς στάσεως, is neatly contained inside the noun phrase. But both word orders are ok.
I thought that it was an adjective modifying στάσεως. /shrug
Sorry about the extra sigma at the end. It was late.
Yes, I should have placed it in the genitive πλήρους if it was an adjective modifying what I thought.
Very instructive and helpful, Hylander. I was much confused by the question, but your reply got me sorted out!
You should be able to tell from the English what “full” modifies, and then make the connection to Greek. Parse your English sentences more carefully… 
Doe πλήρη modify πόλιν? If yes, why is the adjective way over at the end of the phrase?
Inflected languages allow and use this kind of separation between word and modifier. Ancient Greek is an inflected language. Part of learning Greek, or Latin, is getting used to this, and it can be a lot of work.
OK. I just wanted to make sure it was the use of the freedom of word order and not some rule I was not remembering.
Just don’t get the misimpression that Greek word order is entirely free. You can’t simply scramble the words of a sentence and get acceptable results. As you learn Greek, observe how words are ordered in the material in the book, and continue to observe as you advance to reading “real” Greek.
In this case, take note of how the complement of the adjective is sandwiched in between the noun and the adjective that agrees with it. This pattern is different from English, of course, but characteristic of Greek.
i know it is not entirely free, which is why I ask a considerable amount of questions about it.
Good to know about the complement sandwiched in between the noun and adjective.
Mastronarde has a document about word order on his website for the book:
http://atticgreek.org/downloads/WordOrder.pdf
I tried reading the word order document once and could not understand it, especially when the author mentions “marked.” Maybe I will understand it after a couple years?
I doubt there is anything there that could really help someone with the question that you’re asking: what order do I put words in for composition?
It’s a method of analyzing existing Greek sentences, and likely correct as far as it goes. But it needs serious work before it could be turned into a useful tool.