There is really quite a literature on prepositional phrase ordering. Many other rules exist. The most notable being how the adjectives modify adjectives, left to right, as well as the head noun. By modification is meant predication. Others include concepts like more and less intrinsic to the truth structure, the object being referenced, for the sake of the desired inference. It takes a second but even bad good cat makes sense and is much different from a good bad cat.

In Language Neuroscience we have to account for how the brain computes these things and why these predication orderings are as they are (for a particularly language, though much is universal).

My Ph.D. is in intersentential inference where anaphoric reference (e.g., pronoun reference, inferred causality) follows a similar lack of grammatical rules.

Here is a paper I published in 1974 on the brain computation behind prepositional phrase ordering constraints:
https://www.academia.edu/80385627/Decision_and_Modification_in_Sequences_of_Prepositional_Phrases?source=swp_share

These are not, however, habits. Habits are learned. There is every reason to believe a lot of these ordering constraints have to do with how the brain innately organizes its knowledge in recognizing the familiar across modalities, including speech but also including vision, binaural localization, and even action. Speed is king. Sentences in any natural language represent an incredible amount of computation with dire constraints on accessing knowledge anywhere in the brain at speeds favored by natural selection.

Here is how your brain computes. It is all about some facts about people's ability to speedily recognize and generate grammatically correct sentences with all the other cognitive (both conscious and unconscious) constraints as well.

It turns out understanding deception is also a big part of understanding these computations for what they actually are at the 'neural' level. It's what neurons do for a living, in any metazoan. It deciphering what predicates what which is the same as deciphering what needs to happen (be said, be moved physically). In natural language you see the full majesty of the uniquely human brain and every other brain as well. We are currently making great progress figuring out these computational structures in our AI/NLP models etc.

https://medium.com/liecatcher/how-your-brain-computes-41ebe7428ff9

An interesting place to see the full glory of human language and cognitive computation is in dissecting lies. We have weekly public trials in the Internet Court of Lies where you can some amazing insights on just how truly amazing this all is, and how the rules of ordering words work with your metazoan conniving brain. Sign up at www.liecourt.com to get the weekly webinar link...trials only last about fifteen minutes and currently run every Wednesday at noon EST.

Here is my first published paper on brain computation on prepositional phrase ordering: