The Syntactic Buoyancy Principle (Sadock 2000) is a grammatical property of English whereby a "lighter" constituent floats towards "the surface," or the initial position of a sentence, or to put it the opposite way round, that a "heavier" constituent moves towards the "bottom," or the end of a sentence. Whereas some researchers look upon it as a mere statistical tendency and/or relegate it to a preferred style of English, the past ten years of research has seen linguists come to a certain agreement that it might constitute part of English grammar (e.g., Hawkins 2000; Wasow 2002). In this short article, I would like to suggest one way of teaching it as a guiding principle that regulates apparently local and idiosyncratic word order facts in English. This is only a portion of a larger work that attempts to more actively incorporate linguistic studies into language pedagogy (Yuhara 2010, 2011). The goal is no more than to list a permissible range of word order facts in written English, and I do not suggest that the Syntactic Buoyancy Principle alone is capable of accounting for all word ordering facts.

研究ノート