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This paper investigates the phenomenon of imbalance between the frequencies of the  nice and  Adj and Adj  and nice  patterns from the perspective of humans’ social and limited-processing-capacity attributes. Humans’ social attribute requires that language users stay informative with minimal effort in communication, resulting in the from-the-least-to-the-most-informative information organization in discourse. Their limited-processing-capacity attribute requires that they resort to the production biases of “easy first” and “plan reuse” in order to achieve communicative efficiency in real-time production. The analysis of the occurrences of the  nice and  Adj pattern and native speakers’ judgment of the degree of informativeness of  nice  in these occurrences suggest that  nice  is largely delexicalized. Such delexicalization makes  nice and  Adj consistent with the information organization and allows language users to stay informative with the use of the pattern, thus in line with the social attribute, but not Adj  and nice . In the meantime,  nice  is not only highly frequent but also conceptually salient when it comes to the positive property (Panther &amp; Thornburg, 2009), making  nice and  Adj easier to produce and more likely to be reused than Adj  and nice , thus in line with the limited-processing-capacity attribute. The analysis of the unbalanced frequency of the two patterns suggests that human attributes should be considered when studying language form, and this should offer insights into English learning.

Why Is nice and Adj So Much More Frequent than Adj and nice ?—From the Perspective of Humans’ Social and Limited-Processing-Capacity Attributes