Communicative pressures influence the use of adverbs as well as adjectives: evidence from a crosslinguistic investigation

Abstract It has long been observed in previous research that language production is under the influence of communicative pressures. Language users tend to act efficiently and to structure their utterances to optimize communicative properties. In this study, based on the communicative efficiency hypothesis, we tested two predictions about the use of adjectives and adverbs, respectively. Specifically, it is predicted that pre-nominal languages should use modifying adjectives at a higher rate, and pre-verbal languages should use modifying adverbs at a higher rate. The predicted correlation about adjective ordering was indeed observed. However, contrary to the second prediction, our results indicate no significant difference in the use of adverbs between pre-and post-verbal languages. We argued that the different performances of adjectives and adverbs lie in the fact that event reference is more complex than entity reference: language users rely not only on adverbs, but also on objects in the events denoted by verbs (V). We revised our prediction by considering the relative placement of objects (O), and found that VO languages that favor pre-verbal adverbs do exhibit higher rates of modification.