A new explanation for a fundamental observation
Prof John Mansfield and Dr Sebastian Krapp recently published a research article in Cognitive Science, presenting a new and parsimonious explanation for "harmonic word order", which is one of the most widely observed patterns in human language syntax. They show that the observed harmonic ordering of modifiers with respect to their heads can be very simply explained as a consequence of word-class frequencies, and to do spell out a simple algorithm for ordering words in phrases.