Heavy-NP shift occurs when speakers prefer placing lengthy or “heavy” noun phrase direct objects in the clause-final position within a sentence rather than in the post-verbal position. Two experiments were conducted in this study, and their results suggested that having a long noun phrase affected the ordering of constituents (the noun phrase and prepositional phrase) by advanced Iranian EFL le...

Heavy noun phrase shift refers to the phenomenon where a “heavy” noun phrase (NP) is displaced to the right of its canonical position. In English, heavy NP shift most commonly refers to the object (in square brackets) being found at the right edge of the sentence, to the right of indirect objects, adverbs, prepositions, etc. (1) I gave _ to the students [presents that I had brought back from Sp...

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 the canonical postverbal position. Three experiments using several task variations confirmed that length of the noun phrase influenced the ordering of the noun phrase and prepositional phrase during production. We also found that heavy-NP shift was strongly con...

Even in relatively configurational languages, such as English, speakers frequently have a choice between different constituent orders. Many of these word order variations have been linked to complexity (Hawkins 2005; inter alia). For example, heavy-NP shift is more likely if the shifted NP is more complex than the NP it shifts over (Wasow 1997). Other cases of word order variations, however, ha...

Two eye movement experiments explored the roles of verbal subcategorization possibilities and transitivity biases in the processing of heavy NP shift sentences in which the verb's direct object appears to the right of a post-verbal phrase. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences in which a prepositional phrase immediately followed the verb, which was either obligatorily transitive or had a...