A number of functionalist studies on word order attest the importance of the end-weight principle, according to which heavier phrasal constituents tend to be places in sentence final position. In this paper we show some evidence that this principle can provide a straightforward account of the variable position of temporal Prepositional Phrases (PP) in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. The order of such constituents is analyzed in two ways: first, we consider sentences that contain only one temporal PP in different positions (initial, medial, and final); second, we extend the analysis to sentences containing time, manner, and place adverbials in post-verbal position. By means of a quantitative analysis, we verify the correlation between the length of the temporal PP and its position in the sentence. The results show that the constraints imposed by the end-weight principle are attestable particularly in sentences where the temporal PP co-occur with other adverbials, mainly place and manner adverbials, and supersede the semantic and syntactic ones.
Temporal PPs; Position; Variation; Weight
