Hostname: page-component-5db58dd55d-688nx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-06-12T17:33:38.274Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Jennifer E. Arnold ,
Anthony Losongco ,
Thomas Wasow  and
Ryan Ginstrom
Jennifer E. Arnold*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Anthony Losongco
Affiliation:
Yale University
Thomas Wasow
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Ryan Ginstrom
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
*
Jennifer Arnold, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, 3401 Walnut St. Suite 400 A, Philadelphia, PA 19102, [jarnold@linc.cis.upenn.edu]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Variations in postverbal constituent ordering have been attributed to both grammatical complexity (heaviness) and discourse status (newness), although few studies compare the two factors explicitly. Through corpus analysis and experimentation, we demonstrate that both factors simultaneously and independently influence word order in two English constructions. While past investigations of these factors have focused on their effects in language comprehension, we argue that postponing heavy and new constituents facilitates processes of planning and production.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 76 , Issue 1 , March 2000 , pp. 28 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Linguistic Society of America

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

Anderson, Anne H., Bard, Ellen G., Sotillo, Cathy, Newlands, Alison; and Doherty-Sneddon, Gwynneth. 1997. Limited visual control of the intelligibility of speech in face-to-face dialogue. Perception and Psychophysics 594. 580–92.Google Scholar
Ariel, Mira. 1990. Accessing noun-phrase antecedents. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Arnold, Jennifer E. 1998. Reference form and discourse patterns. Stanford, CA: Stanford University dissertation.Google Scholar
Arnold, Jennifer E., and Wasow, Thomas. 1996. The effect of production constraints on particle movement and dative alternation. Poster presented at the CUNY conference on human sentence processing, New York City.Google Scholar
Bates, Elizabeth, and MacWhinney, Brian. 1989. Functionalism and the competition model. The cross-linguistic study of sentence processing, ed. by MacWhinney, Brian and Bates, Elizabeth, 3–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Behaghel, Otto. 1909/10. Beziehungen zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge von Satzgliedern. Indogermanische Forschungen 25. 110–42.Google Scholar
Behaghel, Otto. 1930. Von deutscher Wortstellung. Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde, Jargang 44 der Zeitschrift für deutschen Unterricht: 81–89.Google Scholar
Bever, Thomas G. 1970. The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. Cognition and the development of language, ed. by Hayes, John R., 279–362. New York: Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Birner, Betty J. 1998. Recency effects in English inversion. Centering theory in discourse, ed. by Walker, Marilyn A., Joshi, Aravind K., and Prince, Ellen F., 309–23. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Birner, Betty J., and Ward, Gregory. 1998. Information status and noncanonical word order in English. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. Kathryn. 1986. Meaning, sound, and syntax: Lexical priming in sentence production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 124. 575–86.Google Scholar
Bock, J. Kathryn. 1987. An effect of the accessibility of word forms on sentence structures. Journal of Memory and Language 26. 119–37.Google Scholar
Bock, J. Kathryn. 1989. Closed-class immanence in sentence production. Cognition 31. 163–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bock, J. Kathryn., and Irwin, David E. 1980. Syntactic effects of information availability in sentence production. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 19. 467–84.Google Scholar
Bock, J. Kathryn., and Loebell, Helga. 1990. Framing sentences. Cognition 35. 1–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bock, J. Kathryn., and Warren, Richard K. 1985. Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation. Cognition 21. 47–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chafe, Wallace L. 1976. Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. Subject and topic, ed. by Li, Charles N., 25–56. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace L. 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1970. Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation. Semantics, ed. by Steinberg, Danny and Jakobovits, Leon, 183–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1975. The logical structure of linguistic theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. 1973. The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 12. 335–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. 1994. Managing problems in speaking. Speech Communication 15. 243–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Herbert H., and Clark, Eve V. 1977. Psychology and language: An introduction to psycholinguistics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H., and Haviland, Susan E. 1977. Comprehension and the given-new contrast. Discourse production and comprehension, ed. by Freedle, Roy O., 1–40. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H., and Marshall, Catherine R. 1981. Definite reference and mutual knowledge. Elements of discourse understanding, ed. by Joshi, Aravind K., Webber, Bonnie L., and Sag, Ivan A., 10–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H., and Wasow, Thomas. 1998. Repeating words in spontaneous speech. Cognitive Psychology 27. 201–42.Google Scholar
Erdmann, Peter. 1988. On the principle of ‘weight’ in English. On language, rhetorica phonologica syntactica: A festschrift for Robert P. Stockwell from his friends and colleagues, ed. by Duncan-Rose, Caroline K. and Vennemann, Theo, 325–39. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ferreira, Victor S. 1996. Is it better to give than to donate? Syntactic flexibility in language production. Journal of Memory and Language 35. 724–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferreira, Victor S., and Dell, Gary S. 1998. Syntactic and lexical choices in language production: What we can learn from ‘that’. Paper presented at the Eleventh Annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing, Rutgers University.Google Scholar
Firbas, Jan. 1966. Non-thematic subjects in contemporary English. Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 2. 239–54.Google Scholar
Fox Tree, Jean E., and Clark, Herbert H. 1997. Pronouncing ‘the’ as ‘thee’ to signal problems in speaking. Cognition 62. 151–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frazier, Lynn, and Fodor, Janet D. 1978. The sausage machine: A two-stage parsing model. Cognition 6. 291–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, Edward. 1997. Syntactic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cambridge, MA: MIT, ms.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1983. Topic continuity in discourse. Quantitative cross-language studies, TSL #3. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1988. The pragmatics of word-order: Predictability, importance and attention. Studies in syntactic typology, ed. by Hammond, Michael, Moravcsik, Edith A., and Wirth, Jessica R., 243–84. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette K. 1988. Universals of topic-comment structure. Studies in syntactic typology, ed. by Hammond, Michael, Moravcsik, Edith A., and Wirth, Jessica R., 209–39. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette K., Hedberg, Nancy; and Zacharski, Roger. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions. Language 69. 274–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K. 1967. Notes on transitivity and theme in English, part 2. Journal of Linguistics 3. 199–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1990. A parsing theory of word order universals. Linguistic Inquiry 21. 223–61.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1994. A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hockett, Charles. 1958. A course in modern linguistics. New York: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horton, William S., and Keysar, Boaz. 1996. When do speakers take into account common ground? Cognition 59. 91–117.Google ScholarPubMed
Kimball, John. 1973. Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language. Cognition 2. 15–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information structure and sentence form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levelt, Willem J. M. 1989. Speaking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacDonald, Maryellen C. 1996. Representation and activation in syntactic processing. Attention and performance 16: Information integration in perception and communication, ed. by Inui, Toshio and McClelland, James L., 433–56. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
MacDonald, Maryellen C., Pearlmutter, Neal J.; and Seidenberg, Mark S. 1994. The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review 1014. 676–703.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Niv, Michael. 1992. Right association revisited. Paper presented at the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Newark, DE.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffrey, Sag, Ivan A.; and Wasow, Thomas. 1994. Idioms. Language 70. 491–538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Postal, Paul. 1974. On raising. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan, and Smolensky, Paul. 1993. Optimality theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. (RuCCS Technical Report 2.) New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen. 1981. Towards a taxonomy of given-new information. Radical pragmatics, ed. by Cole, P., 223–56. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen. 1992. The ZPG letter: Subjects, definiteness, and information status. Discourse description: Diverse analyses of a fundraising text, ed. by Thompson, Sandra and Mann, William, 295–325. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey; and Svartvik, Jan. 1972. A grammar of contemporary English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Sag, Ivan, and Wasow, Thomas. 1999. Syntactic theory: A formal introduction. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Schafer, Amy J., and Speer, Shari R. 1999. Intonational disambiguation in sentence production and comprehension. Paper presented at the Twelfth Annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing, New York City.Google Scholar
Siewierska, Anna. 1993. Syntactic weight vs. information structure and word order variation in Polish. Journal of Linguistics 29. 233–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stallings, Lynne. 1998. Relative weight in the production of heavy-NP shift. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, New York.Google Scholar
Stallings, Lynne., MacDonald, Maryellen C.; and O'Seaghdha, Padraig G. 1998. Phrasal ordering constraints in sentence production: Phrase length and verb disposition in heavy-NP shift. Journal of Memory and Language 39. 392–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomlin, Russell S. 1998. Mapping conceptual representations into linguistic representations: The role of attention in grammar. With language in mind, ed. by Nuyts, Jan and Pederson, Eric, 162–89 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trueswell, John C., and Tanenhaus, Michael K. 1994. Towards a lexicalist framework of constraint-based syntactic ambiguity resolution. Perspectives on sentence processing, ed. by Jr, Charles Clifton., Frazier, Lyn, and Rayner, Keith, 155–79. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Vallduvi, Enric. 1990. The information component. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.Google Scholar
Wasow, Thomas. 1997a. Remarks on grammatical weight. Language Variation and Change 9. 81–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wasow, Thomas. 1997b. End-weight from the speaker's perspective. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 26. 347–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar