Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research has proposed that adjective form (i.e., whether adjectives typically occur before or after the nouns they modify) interacts with considerations from efficient communication to determine the rate at which we use adjectives to resolve reference to objects. According to this efficiency hypothesis, languages with pre-nominal adjectives use modifying adjectives at a higher rate in an effort to aid incremental reference resolution. We test this broad typological prediction in a large-scale corpus analysis of 74 languages, finding that languages that favor pre-nominal adjectives indeed do exhibit higher rates of adjectival modification than languages that favor post-nominal adjectives.