Abstract
In order to examine whether Arabic has Heavy Noun Phrase Shifting (HNPS), I have extracted from the Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank a data set in which a verb governs either an object NP and an Adjunct Phrase (PP or AdvP) or a subject NP and an Adjunct Phrase. I have used binary logistic regression where the criterion variable is whether the subject/object NP shifts, and used as predictor variables heaviness (the number of tokens per NP, adjunct), part of speech tag, verb disposition (ie. whether the verb has a history of taking double objects or sentential objects), NP number, NP definiteness, and the presence of referring pronouns in either the NP or the adjunct. The results show that only object heaviness and adjunct heaviness are useful predictors of object HNPS, while subject heaviness, adjunct heaviness, subject part of speech tag, definiteness, and adjunct head POS tags are active predictors of subject HNPS. I also show that HNPS can in principle be predicted from sentence structure.
Highlights
Heavy NP shift (Kimball 1973) occurs in English when a heavy or long direct object NP occurs in the final position in the clause, separated from the verb by something like a prepositional phrase
This may have been the first mention of Heavy Noun Phrase Shifting (HNPS) in Arabic, and while it was concerned with the subject, it can apply to the object in relation to the prepositional phrase and the adverb
Logistic regression is commonly used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) predictions, it is commonly known in the NLP community as Maximum Entropy Classification
Summary
Heavy NP shift (Kimball 1973) occurs in English when a heavy or long direct object NP occurs in the final position in the clause, separated from the verb by something like a prepositional phrase. The subject and object] are both important” This stylistic view of Arabic word order has iterated in the case of the prepositional phrase and the adverb as well, but while there is a preferred, or default, VSO order, the position of adverbs and prepositional phrases in the sentence does not seem to have a strong preference. Hassan (1974: 444–445) and Ali (2011) share the same view about prepositional phrases, but Anis (1978: 234) explains that when the subject is long, in terms of the number of words it comprises, it comes after the other, shorter, head dependents This may have been the first mention of HNPS in Arabic, and while it was concerned with the subject, it can apply to the object in relation to the prepositional phrase and the adverb.
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