This metaphor applies to how close words are to one another.
Lakoff and Johnson claim English has a metaphor Closeness is Strength of Effect.
* The President listened to his *closest* advisors.
They say that applies to word/phoneme positioning. Consider these two sentences:
* Harry is unhappy. * Harry is not happy.
The latter is a weaker statement because Harry could be in some intermediate state.
* I taught Greek to Harry. * I taught Harry Greek.
The latter has more of a connotation that the teaching was successful. The latter could be rephrased as "Larry learned Greek" without qualm; not so the former.
* Harry found that the chair was comfortable. * Harry found the chair comfortable.
The latter means Harry sat in the chair. The former admits the possibility that Harry just asked whoever was sitting in it. (Though I think the "that" is doing the work more than the distance between "chair" and "comfortable.")
--- I'm not sure if I buy this. Maybe it's just that shorter sentences come across as more definite, more confident, whereas longer ones are more likely to be hedging their bets. That is, the relative positions of the words within a sentence matters less than how long the whole sentence is.