# The exponential distribution of the order of demonstrative, numeral, adjective and noun

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06342 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06342/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17047/) (2025)
- [Scale-free networks are rare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03400/) (2018)
- [Linguistic laws in biology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07387/) (2023)
- [The distribution of syntactic dependency distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14620/) (2022)
- [Source codes in human communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03991/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [How to measure the optimality of word or gesture order with respect to the principle of swap distance minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01938/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The frequency of the preferred order for a noun phrase formed by demonstrative, numeral, adjective and noun has received significant attention over the last two decades. We investigate the actual distribution of the 24 possible orders. There is no consensus on whether it is well-fitted by an exponential or a power law distribution. We find that an exponential distribution is a much better model. This finding and other circumstances where an exponential-like distribution is found challenge the view that power-law distributions, e.g., Zipf's law for word frequencies, are inevitable. We also investigate which of two exponential distributions gives a better fit: an exponential model where the 24 orders have non-zero probability (a geometric distribution truncated at rank 24) or an exponential model where the number of orders that can have non-zero probability is variable (a right-truncated geometric distribution). When consistency and generalizability are prioritized, we find higher support for the exponential model where all 24 orders have non-zero probability. These findings strongly suggest that there is no hard constraint on word order variation and then unattested orders merely result from undersampling, consistently with Cysouw's view.