The relative order of prepositional phrases in English: Going beyond Manner–Place–Time

Abstract

This article argues against Manner–Place–Time and other proposed grammatical principles of ordering for prepositional phrases (PPs) in postverbal position in English. Instead, greater empirical adequacy can be achieved by a theory of processing efficiency that defines a preference for minimal domains in the recognition of syntactic phrase structure and in the processing of lexical–semantic dependencies between verbs and prepositions. Some new entailment tests are proposed on the basis of which these dependencies can be defined. The data come from 500 pages of written English. For 300 pages, an additional analysis is given in terms of structural ambiguity avoidance and pragmatic information status. Syntactic complexity is the biggest single predictor of PP sequences, whereas lexical–semantic factors predominate when syntactic preferences are weak. Manner–Place–Time is not the correct semantic generalization, however. Ambiguity avoidance had no clear impact on these orderings. Pragmatic effects were not visible when syntactic weight made no predictions and were correlated with weight when it did but were less strongly supported.