Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-bvgqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-29T23:45:52.192Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Remarks on grammatical weight

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 June 2009

Thomas Wasow
Thomas Wasow
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Long, complex phrases tend to come at the ends of clauses; this is called “endweight.” A variety of characterizations of weight have been proposed in the literature, but none has been sufficient to cover the full range of attested cases of end-weight. Corpus data on heavy NP shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight that are highly correlated with constituent ordering. Proposed explanations for endweight have been based on parsing considerations, largely ignoring the speaker; but what facilitates parsing does not always help in production. Examination of phenomena where these interests do not coincide indicates that the demands of sentence planning provide a better explanation for end-weight than parsing. Finally, accounts of end-weight cannot be purely structure-based, but must take lexical factors into consideration.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , March 1997 , pp. 81 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Behaghel, Otto. (1909/1910). Beziehungen zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge von Satzgliedern. Indogermanische Forschungen 25: 110–142.Google Scholar
Benson, Morton, Benson, Evelyn, & Ilson, Robert. (1986). The BBI combinatory dictionary of English: A guide to word combinations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bever, Thomas G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Hayes, J. R. (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley. 279–362.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. (1975). The logical structure of linguistic theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. (1994). Managing problems in speaking. Speech Communication 15: 243–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H., & Wasow, Thomas. (in preparation). Repeating words as a strategy in spontaneous speaking.Google Scholar
Dupré, John. (1993). The disorder of things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Emonds, Joseph. (1976). A transformational approach to English syntax. New York: Academic.Google Scholar
Enderton, Herbert B. (1972). A mathematical introduction to logic. New York: Academic.Google Scholar
Erdmann, Peter. (1988). On the principle of ‘weight’ in English. In Duncan-Rose, C. & Vennemann, T. (Eds.), On language, rhetorica phonologica syntactica: A festschrift for Robert P. Stockwell from his friends and colleagues. London: Routledge. 325–339.Google Scholar
Fodor, Jerry A. (1983). Modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox Tree, Jeanne E., & Clark, Herbert H. (1994). Pronouncing ‘the’ as /thiy/ to signal trouble in spontaneous conversation. Paper presented at the Psychonomics Society, St. Louis, MO.Google Scholar
Francis, W. Nelson. (1964). A standard sample of present-day English for use with digital computers. Report to the U.S. Office of Education on Cooperative Research Project No. E-007. Brown University, Providence, RI.Google Scholar
Frazier, Lynn, & Fodor, Janet D. (1978). The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model. Cognition 6: 291–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, Edward, & Pearlmutter, Neal J. (1995). A corpus-based analysis of psychohnguistic constraints on PP attachment. In Clifton, C., Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Green, Georgia. (1974). Semantics and syntactic regularity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane. (1991). Introduction to Government & Binding Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John. (1990). A parsing theory of word order universal. Linguistic Inquiry 21: 223–261.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John. (1994). A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Inoue, Atsu, & Fodor, Janet Dean. 1995. Information-paced parsing of Japanese. In Mazuka, R. & Nagai, N. (Eds.), Japanese sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Kimball, John. (1973). Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language. Cognition 2: 15–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. (1969). The logic of nonstandard English. In Georgetown Monographs on Languages and Linguistics 22. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Levin, Beth. (1993). English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Marcus, Mitchell P., Santorini, Beatrice, & Marcinkiewicz, Mary Ann. (1993). Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn Treebank. Computational Linguistics 19: 313–330.Google Scholar
McDonald, Janet L., Bock, Kathryn, & Kelly, Michael H. (1993). Word and world order: Semantic, phonological, and metrical determinants of serial position. Cognitive Psychology 25: 188–230.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Newmeyer, Frederick. (1992). Iconicity and generative grammar. Language 68: 756–796.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Niv, Michael. (1992). Right association revisited. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oehrle, Richard T. (1976). The grammatical status of the English dative alternation. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven. (1994). The language instinct. New York: William Morrow.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey, & Svartvik, Jan. (1972). A grammar of contemporary English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rickford, John, Wasow, Thomas, Mendoza-Denton, Norma, & Espinoza, Julie. (1995). Syntactic variation and change in progress: Loss of the verbal coda in topic-restricting as far as constructions. Language 71:101–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, John R. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Stallings, Lynne M., MacDonald, Maryellen C., & O'Seaghdha, Padraig G. (1995). Phrasal ordering constraints in sentence production: phrase length and verb disposition in heavy-NP shift. Unpublished manuscript, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Zee, Draga, & Inkelas, Sharon. (1990). Prosodically constrained syntax. In Inkelas, S. & Zee, D. (Eds.) The phonology-syntax connection. Chicago: CSLI and the University of Chicago Press. 365–378.Google Scholar