Re: Heavy constituents in left-branching langs

on 1/7/07 10:27 AM, David J. Peterson at dedalvs@GMAIL.COM wrote:

> You know, I went to a talk a year or so ago about heavy shift
> in Japanese, and I'd be able to find the handout had I not just
> moved (we have the TV, my desk, and the bed set up--and that's
> it).  The basic answer, though, is...yes: all languages do this--even
> Japanese.  The shifting discussed, though, is between NP's.  So if
> LP is a light NP and HP is a heavy NP, you'd see this...
>
> HP LP V
>
> Regardless of the grammatical role served by the HP and LP
> (leading to OSV word order, in some cases).  Of course, it has
> to be heavy, and the heavier the better.
>
> There were some differences noted between the type of shifting
> you see in head-final and head-initial languages, but they were
> slight, and I can't remember them (again, my handouts are packed
> and buried...).  I think the difference was that in a language like
> Japanese you see a preference for long before short, but in a
> language like English, you see a preference for short before long,
> but both of these are identical in that they want to pull the short
> ones in closer to the verb, and push the long ones out--which
> to me, at least, makes sense, since it's like you're trying to keep
> the sentence together as best you can, and if the long thing's in
> the middle, there's a chance you could lose it all.  There was
> another major point made in the talk, but I can't recall.  Perhaps
> someone can find a reference somewhere.
>
> -David
This certainly does help clarify the structure of the sentence, and makes
sense in that regard. But as far as notifying the listener that something
you're saying is a quote before too much time has elapsed, moving the quote
in front of the subject as well as the verb only makes things worse.

Or maybe speakers of these languages just don't make any presumptions about
whether what they're hearing is a quote or represents the opinions of the
speaker, and sit in suspense until the end of every utterance? Or maybe they
do presume non-quote status, and just get jolted now and then when they find
out they're wrong and have to rethink any conclusions they'd drawn?

Let me know if you ever find those papers!

Josh Roth