Rules no one teaches but everyone learns

"I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language."<p>-- J.R.R. Tolkien, from a letter to W.H. Auden (7 June 1955)

This is the kind of thing that should be picked up by statistical parsers which presumably use patterns like this to choose the "correct" parse of a sentence from the multitude of possibilities. Of course it is more meaningful when a human points it out.<p>The "Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose" hierarchy should enable inferences about the meaning of words which have never been seen before. It would be really interesting to see if someone could construct something like wordnet from inferences based on patterns like this.

If you enjoyed this article, check out the book _The_Language_Instinct_ by Steven Pinker, which is all about the cognitive basis behind language.<p>He has a good followup that I haven't quite gotten through yet, called _The_Stuff_of_Thought_ that's a bit more about how rules of language serve as clues to how the brain processes information.<p>A couple of his other books are less related to language, but equally good: _The_Blank_Slate_ and _How_the_Mind_Works_.<p>They're all pretty accessible (certainly to a crowd like the one that reads HN), if not exactly light reading.

I would actually disagree that these rules are not "taught" - I believe they are taught and learned, just as language is taught and learned, and the order in which you place adjectives, and in fact the entire language "structure" will in large degree depend on your primary language, and how your parents talked to you as an infant/toddler/child.

I'm not sure that I agree with the notion that "layered" adjectives don't require commas. <i>"His battered old canvas fishing hat"</i> certainly seems as though it could use a pause. But then, I tend to think of commas as as indicators of verbal pacing more than strict grammatical constructs.

I didn't know I knew that, but now that I know I know it, maybe my words wont step on each other any more.

This is pretty cool. I remember once joking with a friend, and I offhandedly described her office as being in a "little crappy building". As soon as it came out of my mouth, I realized it should have been "crappy little building" (opinion precedes size).

This axiom could serve as a great launch-pad for introducing set theory.