The effects of length and complexity on constituent ordering in written English

• Authors: Hua Wang , Haitao Liu
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Based on the written part of the British Component of International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), this paper investigates the interrelationship between length and complexity of sentential constituents and their positions in the sentence. Results show that length and complexity affect sentential constituent ordering. Within the sentence, the longest and the most complex constituents tend to occur in the final position, and the relatively shorter and less complex constituents tend to be in the initial position. However, for sentential constituents in other positions, the length-complexity-position relationship appears to be random. Possible explanations for the findings are provided from different perspectives, especially from the distribution of given and new information.

Keywords

EN

corpus; length; complexity; constituent ordering; information structure

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 50
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 477-494

Dates

accepted

2013-10-22

received

2014-03-30

revised

2014-10-01

online

2014-11-14

Contributors

author

Hua Wang

• Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

author

Haitao Liu

• Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
• Zhejiang University, Ningbo, China

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/psicl-2014-0024