Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research on adjective ordering in linguistics andpsychology has focused primarily on the unmarked or defaultorder of adjectives, as in large blue car. Inverted word order,as in blue large car, which violates the proposed semanticconstraints on adjective placement, received relatively littleattention. In two studies we show that the inverted order is notas limited in scope as previous researchers have argued. Wepropose that the inverted word order reflects the subjectivedistance principle: the attribute that is psychologically closerto the speaker is mentioned first. Our explanation draws onresearch on word order in binomials, thus connecting twopreviously unrelated research traditions on word order inlinguistics and cognitive psychology.