PHRASAL ORDERING CONSTRAINTS IN SENTENCE PRODUCTION - PHRASE LENGTH AND VERB DISPOSITION IN HEAVY-NP SHIFT

Heavy-NP shift is the tendency for speakers to place long or ''heavy'' noun phrase direct objects at the end of a sentence rather than in th e canonical postverbal position. Three experiments using several task variations confirmed that length of the noun phrase influenced the ord ering of the noun phrase and prepositional phrase during production. W e also found that heavy-NP shift was strongly constrained by the ''shi fting disposition'' of individual verbs. Verbs that do not require the ir complements (e.g., sentential complements) to appear in an adjacent position yielded more shifting during production than did verbs that more frequently appear adjacent to their complements. Analyses of deci sion/preparation times suggested that shifted and unshifted structures competed for selection. These findings point to the simultaneous acti vation of lexically derived syntactic representations and ordering opt ions in sentence planning. A multiple constraints framework provides a means of reconciling the existence of competition among ordering opti ons with incremental sentence construction. (C) 1998 Academic Press.