Mandarin has subjectivity-based adjective ordering preferences in the presence of de

Shi, Yuxin; Scontras, Gregory

doi:10.3765/plsa.v5i1.4711

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Empirical investigations of adjective ordering have focused on the cross-linguistic stability of these preferences across a host of unrelated languages (e.g., Dixon, 1982;Hetzron, 1978;Sproat and Shih, 1991). For example, where English speakers prefer 'big blue box' to 'blue big box', Mandarin speakers similarly prefer dà-de lán-de xiāng-zi 'big blue box' to lán-de dà-de xiāng-zi 'blue big box' (Shi and Scontras, 2020). In post-nominal languages, we find the mirror-image of the English pattern, such that adjectives that are preferred closer to the noun in pre-nominal languages are also preferred closer to the noun in post-nominal languages.…”

Section: Empirical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting cross-linguistic adjective order with information gain

Dyer¹,

Futrell²,

Liu³

et al. 2021

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Languages vary in their placement of multiple adjectives before, after, or surrounding the noun, but they typically exhibit strong intralanguage tendencies on the relative order of those adjectives (e.g., the preference for 'big blue box' in English, 'grande boîte bleue' in French, and 'als . undūq al'azraq alkabīr' in Arabic). We advance a new quantitative account of adjective order across typologically-distinct languages based on maximizing information gain. Our model addresses the left-right asymmetry of French-type ANA sequences with the same approach as AAN and NAA orderings, without appeal to other mechanisms. We find that, across 32 languages, the preferred order of adjectives mirrors an efficient algorithm of maximizing information gain.

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Section: Empirical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting cross-linguistic adjective order with information gain

Dyer¹,

Futrell²,

Liu³

et al. 2021

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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show abstract

“…A number of studies have found support for subjectivity as a predictor of English ordering preferences (behavioral: Scontras et al 2017;corpus: Wulff 2003, Hill 2012, Scontras et al 2017, Hahn et al 2018, Futrell et al 2020. The behavioral methodology from Scontras et al (2017) has been extended to document subjectivity-based ordering preferences in Mandarin (Shi & Scontras 2020), Arabic and Heritage Arabic (Kachakeche & Scontras 2020), Spanish (Scontras et al 2020), and Greek, Hebrew, and Vietnamese (Scontras et al 2021). Relying on English estimates of subjectivity, Trainin & Shetreet (2021) find general support for subjectivity as a predictor of ordering in Hebrew (see also Trainin & Shetreet 2022), although two of the adjective classes they investigated in their behavioral experiments (pattern and texture adjectives) behaved unexpectedly from the perspective of subjectivity alone.…”

Section: Specific Predictorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adjective Ordering Across Languages

Scontras

2023

Annu. Rev. Linguist.

Self Cite

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Adjective ordering preferences stand as perhaps one of the best candidates for a true linguistic universal: When multiple adjectives are strung together in service of modifying some noun, speakers of different languages—from English to Mandarin to Hebrew—exhibit robust and reliable preferences concerning the relative order of those adjectives. More importantly, despite the diversity of the languages investigated, the very same preferences surface over and over again. This tantalizing regularity has led to decades of research pursuing the source of these preferences. This article offers an overview of the findings and proposals that have resulted. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 9 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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Evaluating a Century of Progress on the Cognitive Science of Adjective Ordering

Dyer,

Torres,

Scontras

et al. 2023

Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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The literature on adjective ordering abounds with proposals meant to account for why certain adjectives appear before others in multi-adjective strings (e.g., the small brown box). However, these proposals have been developed and tested primarily in isolation and based on English; few researchers have looked at the combined performance of multiple factors in the determination of adjective order, and few have evaluated predictors across multiple languages. The current work approaches both of these objectives by using technologies and datasets from natural language processing to look at the combined performance of existing proposals across 32 languages. Comparing this performance with both random and idealized baselines, we show that the literature on adjective ordering has made significant meaningful progress across its many decades, but there remains quite a gap yet to be explained.

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Mandarin has subjectivity-based adjective ordering preferences in the presence of de

Cited by 3 publications

References 7 publications

Predicting cross-linguistic adjective order with information gain

Predicting cross-linguistic adjective order with information gain

Adjective Ordering Across Languages

Evaluating a Century of Progress on the Cognitive Science of Adjective Ordering

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