Universal linguistic hierarchies are not innately wired. Evidence from multiple adjectives

Abstract

Background Linguists and psychologists have explained the remarkable similarities in the orderings of linguistic elements across languages by suggesting that our inborn ability for language makes available certain innately wired primitives. Different types of adjectives, adverbs, and other elements in the functional spine are considered to occupy fixed positions via innate hierarchies that determine orderings such as A>B>C, banning other permutations (*B>C>A). The goal of this research is to tap into the nature and rigidity of such hierarchies by comparing what happens when people process orderings that either comply with them or violate them. Method N = 170 neurotypical, adult speakers completed a timed forced choice task that featured stimuli showing a combination of two adjectives and a Spelke-object (e.g., ‘I bought a square black table’). Two types of responses were collected: (i) acceptability judgments on a 3-point Likert scale that featured the options ‘correct’, ‘neither correct nor wrong’, and ‘wrong’ and (ii) reaction times. The task featured three conditions: 1. size adjective > nationality adjective, 2. color adjective > shape adjective, 3. subjective comment adjective > material adjective. Each condition had two orders. In the congruent order, the adjective pair was ordered in agreement with what is traditionally accepted as dictated by the universal hierarchy. In the incongruent order, the ordering was reversed, thus the hierarchy was violated. Results In the first experiment, the results of n = 140 monolinguals showed that across conditions, both congruent and incongruent orders were generally accepted as correct. For 2/3 conditions, the difference in acceptability ratings between congruent and incongruent orders did not reach statistical significance. Using time as a window to processing, reaction times showed that incongruent orders do not take longer to process than congruent ones, as should be the case if the former were treated as being licensed under some type of special condition (e.g., contrastive focus) that reverses the unmarked order and legitimizes the violation of the hierarchy. In the second experiment, the results of n = 30 bidialectals, tested in both language varieties, corroborated the findings of the first experiment. Conclusions Our findings do not provide evidence for an innate hierarchy for adjective ordering that imposes one rigid, unmarked order. We discuss the importance of notions such as subjectivity and inherentness, and show that for some conditions, not only is there no evidence for a hard constraint that bans incongruent orders, but even simple preferences of congruent orders over incongruent ones are hard to discern. Capturing the bigger picture, given that both the hierarchies and their legit permutations have been described as innate, our results reduce the amount of primitives that are cast as innate, eventually offering a deflationist approach to human linguistic cognition.

Determining the cognitive biases behind a viral linguistic universal: the order of multiple adjectives

“…Within conditions, the effect of order varies: the difference between congruent and incongruent orders is significant in the conditions 'size-nationality' (χ 2 = 56.6, p < 0.001) and 'subjective comment-material' (χ 2 = 99.2, p < 0.001), but not in the condition 'shape-color' (χ 2 = 2.39, p = 0.302). This finding agrees with the results of previous experiments (Adam and Schecker, 2011;Leivada and Westergaard, 2019) and is due to the distance effect: the closest two adjective classes are in (2), the more interchangeable their members are in terms of order. 4 Importantly, this finding does not translate into evidence in favor of SOT, because the distance effect is compatible also with proposals that ground ordering preferences on cognitive notions (Scontras et al, 2017;Leivada and Westergaard, 2019).…”

“…This finding agrees with the results of previous experiments (Adam and Schecker, 2011;Leivada and Westergaard, 2019) and is due to the distance effect: the closest two adjective classes are in (2), the more interchangeable their members are in terms of order. 4 Importantly, this finding does not translate into evidence in favor of SOT, because the distance effect is compatible also with proposals that ground ordering preferences on cognitive notions (Scontras et al, 2017;Leivada and Westergaard, 2019).…”

“…The language of testing was Greek. In previous work (Leivada and Westergaard, 2019), this task was run to two Greek-speaking populations that are different from the bilingual population tested in this work: monolingual speakers of Standard Greek and bidialectal speakers of Standard and Cypriot Greek. The results showed the high acceptability of the structures that deviate from the unmarked order (2), while not finding evidence for an extra processing cost associated with them.…”

Roll-Up is too complex for Romanian 5-year-olds: Evidence from recursive adjectives

“…While both accounts can capture the differences in adjective orderings between English and Romance, the Adjunction account does not provide a principled syntactic motivation for why adjectives occur in this basic order, while Roll-Up offers a syntactic grounding for the ordering. However, it has been claimed that adjective ordering restrictions might not be innate hierarchies as claimed by Cinque (1994Cinque ( , 2005Cinque ( , 2010, given that Romance languages and Greek seem to allow for freer word orders (see Cornilescu & Nicolae 2016, Leivada & Westergaard 2019. This might be thought to pose problems for the Roll-Up Approach and favor the Adjunction approach.…”

A Corpus Investigation of the Ordering of Selected Attributive Adjectives in Slovenian

“…As for Scott's material in support of the universal semantic categories of adjectives relevant for our corpus research is as illustrated in ( 7). ( 7) SIZE>LENGTH>HEIGHT>SPEED>DEPTH>WIDTH>WEIGHT> TEMPERATURE>WETNESS>AGE>SHAPE> COLOR>MATERIAL> NP As a currently highly prominent model in the domain of complex NP research, the cartographic model has attracted a lot of criticism, ranging from the problem of innateness, origin, and functional projection proliferation to the problem of rigidity (e.g., Svenonius 2008, Truswell 2009, Scontras et al 2017, Leivada and Westergaard 2019, Larson 2021. Given the conclusions based on large databases (cases of actual use of multiple adjective strings), the concerns of corpus studies focusing on the rigidity problem, or the so-called empirical undergeneration problem, seem particularly relevant (Wulff 2003, Truswell 2009, Kotowski and Hartl 2019, Trotzke and Wittenberg 2019.…”