Subjectivity Predicts Adjective Ordering Preferences

Abstract

From English to Hungarian to Mokilese, speakers exhibit strong ordering preferences in multi-adjective strings: “the big blue box” sounds far more natural than “the blue big box.” We show that an adjective’s distance from the modified noun is predicted not by a rigid syntax, but by the adjective’s meaning: less subjective adjectives occur closer to the nouns they modify. This finding provides an example of a broad linguistic universal—adjective ordering preferences—emerging from general properties of cognition.