First things first: The pragmatics of “natural order”

Abstract

AbstractClassical rhetoricians dating back to Aristotle sought to define the principles of natural order that determine priority in sequences, especially in linguistic representations. Among the principles with the widest predictive power for the ancients and their modern heirs are those stating that A can be prior to B “with respect to temporal order”, that A can be prior to B with respect to what is “known or less informative” than what comes later, and that A can be prior to B with respect to what is “better” or “more worthy”. But when and how do these ordering principles influence the form of linguistic sequences, and how are conflicts between the principles resolved? What determines the priority between the principles of priority? What makes “natural order” natural? Drawing on over two millennia of scholarship, we explore the pragmatic motivation for the primary ordering principles, and in particular for those affecting the order of logically symmetric but rhetorically asymmetric conjunctions.