Structural and lexical factors in adjective placement in complex noun phrases across Romance languages

Abstract

One of the most common features across all known languages is their variability in word order. We show that differences in the prenominal and postnominal placement of adjectives in the noun phrase across five main Romance languages is not only subject to heaviness effects, as previously reported, but also to subtler structural interactions among dependencies that are better explained as effects of the principle of dependency length minimisation. These effects are almost purely structural and show lexical conditioning only in highly frequent collocations.