Beauzée, Behaghel, and J. R. Ross on Heavy-NP Shift
Summary
J. R. Ross’ rule of Complex (or Heavy) NP Shift acquires a further dimension by tracing its background, first through the stylistic-grammatical tradition harking back to Etienne-Simon de Gamaches (1672–1756) and Nicolas Beauzée (1717–89), and then through the linguistic hypotheses of Henri Weil (1818–1909) and Otto Behaghel (1854–1936). Transformational linguists have not yet tackled the challenging problems raised by this universal rule as it becomes complicated by interference from intonation and sentence accent (bearing on the ordering of atonic particles).
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References
Beauzée, Nicolas
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Vennemann, Theo
Weil, Henri
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