Heaviness in a Verb-final Language: Evidence from Persian

Overview & Synopsis

Studies on constituent ordering preferences have pointed out the tendency to postpone heavy constituents (Heavy NP Shift). This weight effect is generally accounted for in terms of planning and production, since planning heavy constituents requires more cognitive resources than short ones (Arnold et al. 2000; Stallings et al 1998). However, the universality of such explanations is put into question by data from head-final languages, e.g. Japanese, which seem to display a long-before-short tendency (Hawkins1990; Yamashita & Chang2001). In this paper we will present corpus data from Persian, a head-final language in the verbal domain, which also confirms the long-before-short tendency.