A Prosodic Approach to the "Heaviness" Effect

It has been pointed out that a sentence-final noun phrase (NP) must be of some mimmal size in the Heavy NP Shift construction in English. (e.g. He threw - into the wastebasket [the letter from the principle decoder]vs.*He threw - into the wastebasket [the letter])

In this presentation, a prosodic principle that governs the heaviness effect is proposed. While the principle is based on the prosodic approach of Zec and Inkelas (1990) and the processing approach of Hawkins (1990, 1994), it gives a better account of the contrast in (1) than the two approaches:
(1) a. Mary gave - to Sue [that report on Dukakis].
b. ??Mary gave - to Sue [that report on him]. (Inkelas 1989: 17-18)
Theoretically, the prosodic principle is a manifestation of the language-external requirements in the sense of Chomsky (1995).