I thought this might be interesting. It may provide insight into the structure of hierarchy used by the brain.
This grammatical rule is seemingly shared among all languages, with the relative order influenced by the SVO/VSO/OSV structure of the language impacting the relative expression of ideas.
Determiner, opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose, noun.
What this means is that our brains are wired to understand something like this:
The awesome small new rectangular white Apple glass communications device was introduced yesterday.
As opposed to this:
The Apple small communications rectangular awesome glass new white device was introduced yesterday.
The second is grammatically equivalent to the first, but sounds schizophrenic. Both are awkward and arbitrary, but the first is far more coherent sounding.
I was thinking that this meta-grammar could give insight into how knowledge is represented in the brain. Knowing that, or other meta-grammatical rules, could inspire an HTM based natural language system based on the hierarchy that the rules imply.
Does anyone know of other similar rules or phenomena in language?