Haiman’s (1983: 782) distance motivation, which states:“The linguistic distance between expressions corresponds to the conceptual distance between them.”
This iconic principle is also often referred to as Semantic Proximity (SP), whereby constituents that semantically cohere are syntactically placed together. This principle is operative in many ordering patterns in languages. For instance, in English we say ‘long-haired music students’, ‘music’, denoting the major of the students, is semantically more coherent to the head noun ‘students’ than ‘long-haired’ is, hence, it occurs closer to ‘students’ than ‘long-haired’ does.
[1] Loar, J. K. (2011). Chinese syntactic grammar: functional and conceptual principles. New York: Peter Lang.
