Consider a noun phrase formed by a noun, an adjective, a numeral and a demonstrative. There are 24 possible orders but only some of them have been attested when examining the preferred order in world languages. Some researchers hypothesize that there is a hard constraint banning certain orders.

Word order varies within languages but what are the actual constraints? Some word orders are never attested while others have a very low frequency. We could reason that word order diversity has a cost as morphological, lexical,... diversity has a cost in terms of learning, production and processing.

Call for papers for Evolang 2026 is now posted! evolang2026.org. Workshop proposals due Sept 22nd. Paper submissions October 26th. Evolang is interdisciplinarity at its best. We hope to see you in Plovdiv!!

My latest story for National Geographic, about the similarities between whale song and human language, featuring @inbalarnon.bsky.social, @simonkirby.bsky.social, @ellengarland.bsky.social, @masonyoungblood.bsky.social and @rferrericancho.bsky.social!

A new preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... about one paradox in word order #typology. On the one hand, SOV has longer dependency distances and therefore higher processing costs than SVO (@rferrericancho.bsky.social, H.Liu, Futrell et al...)

A healing reading on the reality of the peer-review system (thank you Carles Sora-Domenjo for sending it to me). www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-a...

Not a big surprise, but we confirmed it: far-right parties cause bloc polarization masking other issues in multiparty systems electoral campaign arxiv.org/abs/2410.23177