{"pk":28018,"title":"An Information-Theoretic Explanation of Adjective Ordering Preferences","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Across languages, adjectives are subject to ordering restric-tions. Recent research shows that these are predicted by ad-jective subjectivity, but the question remains open why this isthe case. We first conduct a corpus study and not only replicatethe subjectivity effect, but also find a previously undocumentedeffect of mutual information between adjectives and nouns.We then describe a rational model of adjective use in whichlisteners explicitly reason about judgments made by differentspeakers, formalizing the notion of subjectivity as agreementbetween speakers. We show that, once incremental process-ing is combined with memory limitations, our model predictseffects both of subjectivity and mutual information. We con-firm the adequacy of our model by evaluating it on corpus data,finding that it correctly predicts ordering in unseen data withan accuracy of 96.2 %. This suggests that adjective orderingcan be explained by general principles of human communica-tion and language processing.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6c81w2c5","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hahn","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford","department":""},{"first_name":"Judith","middle_name":"","last_name":"Degen","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford","department":""},{"first_name":"Noah","middle_name":"","last_name":"Goodman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford","department":""},{"first_name":"Dan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Jurafsky","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford","department":""},{"first_name":"Richard","middle_name":"","last_name":"Futrell","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28018/galley/17657/download/"}]}