Weight effects in Slovak

Abstract This corpus study investigates the principle of end-weight, i.e., the role of constituent weight in determining postverbal NP and PP order, in Slovak. Drawing on a 266-token sample from the Slovak National Corpus, I examine whether Slovak, reflecting findings from research on English, exhibits a preference for placing lighter constituents before heavier ones and whether Heavy NP Shift (HNPS) occurs when NPs outweigh PPs. Corroborating experimental studies, the findings reveal that Slovak prefers light-before-heavy ordering, underscoring the cross-linguistic applicability of the principle of end-weight. HNPS is observed in the Slovak data as well. Furthermore, the results suggest that while weight is a robust predictor for postverbal NP and PP ordering, the influence of verb transitivity and individual verbs is less clear. As the first corpus-based investigation of weight effects in Slovak, the study demonstrates that weight effects are a general cognitive constraint that also applies to Slovak.