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An Exploration of Principled Mappings Between English Adjective Order and Subjectivity
Wright, Chloe
Wright, Chloe
Abstract
Adjective order in English is both very strict and largely intuitive. Recent research proposes subjectivity as an underlying mechanism for adjective order; under this view, more subjective adjectives are placed furthest from the noun they describe in multi-adjective strings, while more objective ones occur closer. The present four studies aim to examine whether subjectivity is a productive cue for adjective ordering through two separate grammaticality judgment tasks, an image choice task, and a referential communication task. In the first two studies, participants rated the naturalness of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences paired with images displaying some combination of clear and ambiguous traits. Here, using the subjectivity hypothesis, the ungrammatical order is predicted to be preferred more often when the furthest-placed adjective is describing a visually ambiguous trait. We find that, across both tasks, participants are not more accepting of the ungrammatical order even when that order aligns with visual subjectivity in a given scene. In Study 3, participants chose which image was being identified by a provided description containing two adjectives presented in either the grammatical order or the reverse. They chose images at similar rates, suggesting that they did not map different meanings onto the different orders given. Study 4 introduced a referential communication context; participants were asked to provide descriptions to an imagined partner to pick out a target image from a set, and were also asked to use descriptions given by that partner to choose a target image. In this context, we find that people are sensitive to different orders in a systematic way not present outside of a communicative environment. When taken together, the results here indicate that people are: a) not sensitive to visual subjectivity when making decisions about the naturalness of different orders, and b) rely on visual subjectivity and objectivity as a cue to adjective orders only in specific contexts.
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2025-05-01
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Linguistics