Weight Effects in English and Slovak

Project type: Recovery plan

Project duration: 7/2024–6/2026

Project leader: Dr. phil. Jakob Heinrich Horsch, M.A.

Annotation: The objectives of this project are highly relevant for research on the Slovak language in particular and human language in general: the main aim of the project is to shed light on a phenomenon that has received little attention in research on the Slovak language, namely weight effects on word order. The project is furthermore embedded in an innovative theoretical approach to language analysis known as Usage-based Construction Grammar. This approach has been highly successful in the Anglosphere but is not well known in Slovakia. Thus, fulfilling the objectives of the research project will come with a two-fold advantage: It will promote Usage-based Construction Grammar in the Slovak linguistics community, which has a profound interest in this approach but knows little about it (cf. Horsch 2023d), and it will extend the theory’s reach to Slovak and therefore the Slavic language family, helping to prove the universal applicability of the theory beyond the English language.