The effects of length and complexity on constituent ordering in written English
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Hua Wang
Abstract
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.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Volume 50: The "golden anniversary" of PSiCL
- Effects of speech rate, phonetic background and gender on vowel reduction in the speech of nonnative speakers of English
- On modular approaches to grammar: Evidence from Polish
- Shame, embarrassment and guilt: Corpus evidence for the cross-cultural structure of social emotions
- The effects of length and complexity on constituent ordering in written English
- Imitation of English vowel duration upon exposure to native and non-native speech
- Review of Bożena Cetnarowska and Olga Glebova (eds.). 2012. Image, imagery, imagination in contemporary English studies.
