The Interplay of Noun Phrase Complexity and Modification Type in Scientific Writing (2025)

Abstract: We investigate the interplay of noun phrase (NP) complexity and modification type, namely the choice between pre- and postmodification, using a corpus-based approach. Our dataset is the Royal Society Corpus (RSC, Fischer et al. 2020), a diachronic corpus of English scientific writing. We find that the number of dependents, length of the head noun and distance to the head noun’s own syntactic head (typically the main verb) affect the likelihood of pre- vs. postmodification: NPs with more dependents are more likely to be premodified, NPs with a longer head noun and a head noun closer to its own head are more likely to be postmodified. In addition, we find an effect of syntactic role and definiteness as well as time: The likelihood of premodification over postmodification increases with time and subject NPs as well as indefinite NPs are more likely to be premodified than NPs in other syntactic roles or definite NPs.

## introduction language use has been argued to be shaped by optimization constraints (e.g. @xcite , such as minimizing dependency length between syntactic heads and dependents (e.g. @xcite . this has also been posited for the register of english scientific writing @xcite , in which complex noun phrases (e.g. nps consisting of a head noun modified by several dependents) are a key feature @xcite . english allows both premodification (e.g., in the form of nouns or adjectives, see example 1) and post-modification (e.g. prepositional phrases or finite and non-finite relative clauses, see example 2) in the noun phrase. the two types of modification may also occur at the same time (example 3). 1 (1) however, in this case we may proceed to calculate the total plasma velocity directly [...]. the present study aims to investigate how the increased complexity introduced by highly compressed structures interacts with other aspects of np complexity. premodification has become very common in scientific writing, but does this hold equally for all types of nps, regardless of their complexity (e.g. in terms of number of dependents)? we assume that language users, in general but particularly in scientific writing, aim to maintain communicative efficiency @xcite , for instance by avoiding excessive complexity. given processing constraints, we investigate the hypothesis that more complex nps (e.g. with larger numbers of dependents) tend to be postmodified rather than premodified. taking a corpus-based approach, we utilize universal dependencies annotation @xcite to consider different dependency-based complexity features. in our statistical analysis, we find that several complexity features influence modification type: in contrast to our original hypothesis, we find that a higher dependency number is associated with a greater likelihood of premodification. features like larger distance to the verbal head and greater head noun length, on the other hand, are all associated with a greater likelihood of postmodification. discourse status and syntactic role affect modification type as well, with indefinite nps and subject nps being more likely to be premodified. we also observe an effect of time in line with previous studies, namely an increased likelihood of premodification in later years. this paper is structured as follows: section 2 introduces relevant previous work on scientific writing and linguistic complexity, taking both psycholinguistic and theoretical approaches into account. it also motivates the selection of complexity features included in the analysis, while section 3 describes our dataset and the preprocessing steps. section 4 presents the statistical analysis, with a discussion in subsection 4.4. section 5 on limitations and possible future research wraps up the paper. ## dataset we use the royal society corpus (rsc; @xcite , a diachronic corpus of english scientific writing. the full version 6 contains the philosophical transactions and proceedings of the royal society of london from 1665 to 1995, with over 290 million tokens in more than 47,000 documents. the corpus was built in accordance to fair principles @xcite , preprocessed using standard tools @xcite and annotated with meta-data @xcite . these include author, year of publication, text type (e.g. article, lecture, report, obituary), primary topic and journal (e.g. series a -mathematics and physics, series b -biology). we use version 6.0.3 which was parsed with the python package stanza @xcite and contains universal dependencies annotations @xcite . this version ("good sentences version") contains fewer tokens than the full version 6, since ungrammatical sentences or sentences which might be problematic for parsing (e.g. appendices, image titles, foreign language sentences) were not considered. ## limitations and outlook a major limitation of this analysis is the way discourse-given and discourse-new nps were identified: while givenness and definiteness are correlated in english, they are not identical @xcite : an np with a demonstrative is usually given, an np with a definite article, on the other hand, does not necessarily have to be given, only uniquely identifiable @xcite ). an investigation with more refined discourse annotation might lead to clearer insights on the influence of this factor. moreover, since our focus was on nps headed by a common noun, other possible heads of nps, like pronouns and proper names, were not included in this analysis. future investigations should consider them as well in order to investigate if the results presented here are generalizable to pronouns and proper names. special consideration should also be given to compounds, since the relationship between head and modifier(s) of a compound are presumably stronger than between head and phrasal modifiers. nps with both pre-and postmodification were also not considered here. it might be interesting to look at them in future research: which dependents are added before and which after the head noun? length and internal structure of modifiers are also a factor of interest, since modifiers may themselves contain heads with dependents. investigating these aspects more closely may shed more light on the internal order of np constituents and on the question whether the same principles apply here as for the clause level. it may also illustrate in more detail how competing pressures interact with each other in the process of language optimization.