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Article In: Review of Cognitive Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Weight effects in Slovak

A corpus investigation

ORCiD logo with link | Slovak Academy of Sciences
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Abstract
This corpus study investigates the principle of end-weight, i.e., the role of constituent weight in determining postverbal NP and PP order, in Slovak. Drawing on a 266-token sample from the Slovak National Corpus, I examine whether Slovak, reflecting findings from research on English, exhibits a preference for placing lighter constituents before heavier ones and whether Heavy NP Shift (HNPS) occurs when NPs outweigh PPs.
Corroborating experimental studies, the findings reveal that Slovak prefers light-before-heavy ordering, underscoring the cross-linguistic applicability of the principle of end-weight. HNPS is observed in the Slovak data as well. Furthermore, the results suggest that while weight is a robust predictor for postverbal NP and PP ordering, the influence of verb transitivity and individual verbs is less clear. As the first corpus-based investigation of weight effects in Slovak, the study demonstrates that weight effects are a general cognitive constraint that also applies to Slovak.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Corpus data
    • 2.2Covarying-collexeme analysis
  • 3.Corpus study
    • 3.1Light-before-heavy preference
    • 3.2Heavy NP Shift
    • 3.3Weight difference
    • 3.4Verb transitivity
    • 3.5Lexical verbs
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (41)
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