Syntax-Phonology interface

This paper is a contribution to the on-going debate on the nature of the mechanism(s) of agreement in natural language in minimalist syntactic theorizing, focusing on the interdependence of feature valuation and interpretability on which Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) theory of Agree is founded. To see whether valuation and interpretability go hand in hand, as conjectured by Chomsky (2000, 2001),the feature of (grammatical) gender in Polish, a language with a grammatical gender system and robust inflectional morphology, is investigated here. Taking grammatical gender to be (the content of) the categorizing head in the (lower) functional structure of noun phrases (cf. Lowenstamm 2008), it is shown here with reference to masculine personal nouns in Polish that their non-canonical, emotionally coloured, expressive uses derive from insertion of their roots or stems in the derivation under a categorizing head (n) bearing a feature of grammatical gender which does not license human individuals in their denotation at LF. The choice of n in the narrow syntax has consequences at PF in that inserted under different kinds of categorizing heads, the same roots/stems have different inflectional morphology and agreement patterns. To compute the interpretive difference, LF must have access to the distinguisher on the categorizing head with which the roots/stems are merged in the syntax. Evidence from Polish, a language with a fairly complex grammatical gender system, thus suggests that the feature of grammatical gender may have a role to play on both the PF and LF branches of the derivation. The problem of the (in)dependence of the properties of valuation and interpretability of the features that participate in syntactic operations or relations is addressed here in reference to Chomsky (2000, 2001), where the hypothesis of a logical connection between the valuation of unvalued features and deletion of uninterpretable features to ensure LF convergence is introduced for the first time rather than in reference to the revised conception of Agree in Chomsky (2004, 2008). The revisions in the latter do not bear on the valuation/interpretability biconditional, but they pose numerous problems for the analysis of the derivation of various types of syntactic structures (see Radford 2009: 403–409 for discussion). In particular, if grammatical gender is the bearer of the lexical items’ nominality, it cannot be deleted from the derivation. Confronted with different distinguishers, i.e. values on the nominalizing head n, which is the locus of the feature [Gender] under which the same root/stem inserted in the syntactic derivation is transferred to LF, semantics is forced to compute an interpretive difference, as can be expected on the Strong Minimalist Thesis. If no interpretive effects are triggered by the distinct values, the value parts of the attribute-value pair that encodes gender may be ignored by semantics. Thus, grammatical gender can be present at LF without violating the Principle of Full Interpretation/Legibility Principle.

No podía empezar este trabajo sin mencionar a algunas personas que, de una manera u otra, han colaborado en su proceso de elaboración. En primer lugar, debo agradecer todo su apoyo y compromiso a mis directores: el Dr. Ángel Gallego y la Dra. M. Lluïsa Hernanz. Gracias a ellos, un puñado de ideas dispersas en mi cabeza se han acabado convirtiendo en un trabajo de fin de máster. Al final, las eternas tardes de discusión han dado sus frutos (¡gracias por ser tan pacientes!). Su constante interés por mi investigación y sus palabras de aliento han conseguido empujarme a esforzarme cada día un poco más.

RÉSUMÉ Cette étude est une approche minimaliste de la consonne m considérée comme la seule nasale phonologique dans les langues Kwa. Elle rejette cette analyse étant donné que dans certaines de ces langues, notamment en Ebrié et en Avikam, m est la réalisation phonétique de l'implosive ɓ. S'appuyant sur les données empiriques de telles langues auxquelles s'ajoutent celles d'autres langues du même groupe, l'étude démontre dans une perspective minimaliste que m, dans toutes les langues Kwa où il a été retenu comme phonème, est en variation complémentaire avec ɓ qui est sa forme sous-jacente. ABSTRACT This study is a minimalist approach of the consonant m analyzed as the only phonological nasal in the Kwa languages. It rejects this analysis given that in some of these languages, in particular in Ebrié and in Avikam, m is the phonetic realization of the implosive ɓ. Relying onto the empirical data of such languages and those of other languages from the same linguistic group, the study demonstrates through a minimalist interpretation that m, in all the Kwa languages where it was retained as phoneme, is in a complementary distribution with ɓ which is its underlying structure.

This dissertation provides the first unified account for the distribution and interpretation of wh-words in Hittite as indefinites, interrogatives and relativizers. Based on cross-linguistic comparanda, Hittite wh-words display the typical behavior of indefinite polarity items, and are prosodically deficient. As such, I argue that the surface positioning of wh-words in Hittite involves the syntax-semantics interface, and the syntax-phonology interface.
The non-standard word order of indefinites in Hittite is attributed to two factors. For an existential interpretation, Hittite wh-words must remain within the [vP] and are bound by the Rule of Existential Closure. For a presuppositional interpretation, indefinites undergo Quantifier Raising to IP. The final surface position of indefinites is determined by the syntax-phonology interface to satisfy prosodic restrictions: wh-words in Hittite are subject to Prosodic Inversion at Spell Out.
As an interrogative, I argue that the wh-form consists of a phonologically null determiner plus the Hittite wh-word kui-. Hittite wh-in situ is triggered by an intonational Q-morpheme, and is underspecified as [Q: ], enabling it to license both yes-no questions and wh-questions, as in modern French. Based on experimental evidence from living languages, I propose that the accentual nature of wh-words in Hittite interrogatives is the outcome of the stress assignment by the intonational Q- morpheme.
Finally, I offer the first alternative analysis to Held’s (1957) account of Hittite correlative clauses. I demonstrate that preposed “indeterminate” correlatives represent wh-conditional clauses, as in Mandarin Chinese, Serbo-Croatian, and early Latin. The accented nature of the wh-word in wh-conditionals is derived from the stress assignment by contrastive Focus. I show that the peculiar distribution of the wh-word in “determinate” preposed correlatives resembles that of indefinites: the wh-word is bound by the rule of Existential Closure and may be subject to Prosodic Inversion at Spell Out. I show that postposed correlatives may
be restrictive or non-restrictive, and that Middle Hittite and New Hittite texts also exhibit embedded relative clauses.

In Classical Greek Syntax: Wackernagel's Law in Herodotus, David Goldstein offers the first theoretically-informed study of second-position clitics in Ancient Greek and challenges the long-standing belief that Greek word order is "free" or beyond the reach of systematic analysis. On the basis of Herodotus' Histories, he demonstrates that there are in fact systematic correspondences between clause structure and meaning. Crucial to this new model of the Greek clause is Wackernagel's Law, the generalization that enclitics and postpositives occur in "second position," as these classes of words provide a stable anchor for analyzing sentence structure. The results of this work not only restore word order as an interpretive dimension of Greek texts, but also provide a framework for the investigation of other areas of syntax in Greek, as well as archaic Indo-European more broadly.

"This dissertation explores the phonological representation and the phonetic realization of prosodic prominence in Persian. It comprises two related parts: the first part addresses prosodic phrasing in Persian sentences, while the second part deals with phonetic correlates of prosodic prominence by reporting conducted production and perception experiments. The phonological part is carried out within the framework of Prosodic Phonology, and aims at determining the prosodic structure of Persian from foot level, up to utterance level. By adopting Optimality Theory, it tries to explain how morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints together with prosodic markedness constraints form the prosodic structure of the language. It begins with foot level and suggests that in languages like Persian which have one non-iterative weight-insensitive edgemost stress per word, a single foot which is edge-aligned with the minimal Phonological Word best explains the prosodic pattern at word level. This part also focuses on prosodic differences between lexical words and weak function words (clitics) and shows that any attempt to describe the prosodic structure of Persian without addressing this crucial difference, will not be able to provide explanation for a wide range of phenomena. This study suggests that proclitics and enclitics behave asymmetrically in Persian: enclitics prosodize as affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. Next, it addresses the problem of weak function words which are not a part of their preceding or following XPs, and demonstrates how the phonological well-formedness constraints determine the direction of cliticization in these XP-external function words. It also deals with the issue of clitic clusters in Persian which was not explored in the previous works. Another contribution of this study is reclassification of so-called exceptionally initial-stressed words.
This dissertation also deals with the longstanding problem of Ezafe constructions and by reviewing previous proposals on the prosodic structure of these constructions, based on phonological evidence and phonetic observations suggests that each lexical word in an Ezafe construction maps onto a Phonological Phrase, and the Ezafe morpheme phrases with its preceding material to satisfy the phonological well-formedness constraint ONSET. The prosodic structure of XP-external clitics such as the Ezafe morpheme is explained by adopting a syntax-prosody interface constraint namely MAP-XP, that bans two sister XPs inside a single Phonological Phrase. This study proposes a ranking of OT constraints by which the prosodic structure of Ezafe constructions and other syntactic phrases such as DPs and VPs can be predicted and explained uniformly. It also proposes that the interaction between morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints and prosodic markedness constraints determine prosodic constituents of all levels and their heads, and other constraints require the heads of phonological phrases to be associated with audible accents. The rightmost Phonological Phrase in an Intonational Phrase is the head. This head associates with an accent which is perceived more prominently than the other accents. One further issue explored here is the fact that in lexicalized Ezafe constructions and also in the ones containing given/old information, some words may appear without audible accent.
The phonetic difference between final and non-final accents is the subject of the second half of this dissertation. Previous research on Persian has shown that the main acoustic correlate of prosodic prominence is f0. This study reports production and perception experiment results conducted in order to answer the question whether final (nuclear) accents are perceived more prominently than the other ones only because they are not followed by any other accent, or because they are phonetically different from the non-final (pre-nuclear) accents. The results of production experiments reveal that nuclear accented syllables have a lower f0 range, but a longer duration in comparison with pre-nuclear accented ones. Other parameters such as overall intensity, spectral tilt and vowel quality do not differ significantly in the two types of accents. Perception experiments reveal that native listeners can indeed distinguish the two types of accents without having access to the portion of the utterance that follows the final accent. This proves that the two types of accents are phonetically different. Perception tests also show that the difference between the shapes of f0 curves in the two types of accents is the main acoustic parameter that helps the listeners distinguish them from each other. In pre-nuclear accented words, the f0 peak is at the right edge of the metrically strong syllable, and the curve has a rising slope at this point. In these syllables, the peak may even occur on the initial syllable of the following word. However, in the syllables associated with nuclear accents, the f0 peak is located inside the syllable, and the curve has a falling slope at the right edge of the syllable.
If the f0 at the right edge of a nuclear accented syllable is manipulated and raised so that the f0 peak is moved to the right edge, the native listeners will perceive the word containing this syllable as a pre-nuclear accented word. This study also shows that duration alone cannot cue the difference between the two types of accents. However, when accompanied by f0 changes, it can help the listeners distinguish the two accents more easily and more efficiently.
Downloadable at: http://roa.rutgers.edu/content/article/files/1314_hosseini_1.pdf
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Hittite attests two distinct second positions, occupied by (a) Wackernagel enclitics; (b) non-Wackernagel enclitics -(m)a, -(y)a as well as stressed indefinite and correlative pronouns. I argue that Hittite provides novel data on the syntax-prosody interface as reflected in the operation of the second position constraint: the words belonging to group (b) combine properties which are typically ascribed to stressed and unstressed second position constituents. These findings show that the boundary between the stressed, syntactically conditioned second position exemplified by Germanic verb-second and the unstressed, phonologically conditioned second position of Wackernagel enclitics is much more blurred than is commonly acknowledged.

Féry's "Intonation and Prosodic Structure" (henceforth F2017) is a state-of-the-art survey of the relationship between prosody, morphosyntax and information structure. The book contains highly didactic introductions to the relevant topics such that it can also serve as a textbook for graduate level courses, and possibly for advanced undergraduate courses. Each chapter is complemented with discussion questions and refers the reader to seminal literature discussed in each of the topics treated in each of the chapters. F2017 does not discuss the literature in prosodic phonology in an uncritical fashion but argues for specific assumptions about the way prosodic structure and intonation interact with other parts of grammar. These assumptions can be summarized as follows: (i) Indirect reference theory: Phonological processes do not index morphosyntactic structure directly but make reference to the prosodic hierarchy (ii) Prosodic hierarchy hypothesis: All languages have a fixed set of phonological constituents that are built from mapping principles that refer to morphosyntactic structure; (iii) Recursive prosodic layer hypothesis: Prosodic layers (can) display recursion; (iv) Autosegmental metrical hypothesis: Tones are assigned to a hierchically organized metrical structure and syllables not specified with tones receive their pitch via interpolation; (v) Alignment theory of phonology information structure interactions: Information structural categories such as focus and topic relate to alignment constraints at the syntax-phonology interface rather than directly to phonetic content.

Tone as a distinctive feature used to differentiate not only words but also clause types, is a characteristic feature of Bantu languages. In this paper we show that Bemba relatives can be marked with a low tone in place of a segmental relative marker. This low tone strategy of relativization, which imposes a restrictive reading of relatives, manifests a specific phonological phrasing that can be differentiated from that of non-restrictives. The paper shows that the resultant phonological phrasing favours a head-raising analysis of relativization. In this sense, phonology can be shown to inform syntactic analyses.

The goal of this paper is threefold: firstly to provide a detailed description and analysis of tonal spreading rules at the phrasal level in Copperbelt Bemba (CB); secondly to demonstrate a novel rule interaction in phrasal phonology that involves mutually-feeding iterative rules and how this can be formalized within Optimality Theory; and finally to consider the phonology-syntax mapping in CB and evaluate how well current prosodic correspondence theories -here ALIGN/WRAPXP and Match Theory -account for the prosodic constituent structure in CB.

This paper discusses preposition (P) omission under sluicing (John talked with someone but I don’t know _ who) and the ability of P to take a clitic pronoun as a complement (We talked about’im), correlated with P-stranding (the ability of P to stay in situ when its complement undergoes movement, Who are you talking with_?) through generalizations that were proposed in Merchant (2001) and Abels (2003a,b) respectively. These studies establish P-stranding as a necessary condition for both phenomena, but I show that the correlations may stem instead from the ability of Ps to project independent Prosodic Words in the P-stranding languages.

This paper examines how questions, both Wh-questions and yes-no questions, are phrased in Chimwiini, a Bantu language spoken in southern Somalia. Questions do not require any special phrasing principles, but Wh-questions do provide much evidence in support of the principle Align-Foc R, which requires that focused or emphasized words/constituents be located at the end of a phonological phrase. Question words and enclitics are always focused and thus appear at the end of a phrase. Although questions do not require any new phrasing principles, they do display complex accentual (tonal) behavior. This paper attempts to provide an account of these accentual phenomena.

Icelandic syllabification and the distribution of vowel length have intrigued linguists for decades. There have been numerous (sometimes complementary, sometimes mutually exclusive) attempts to describe the phenomenon from a variety of different angles (see e.g. most of the extant approaches focused on the vocalic quantity in individual (and simple) words, disregarding the complex situation found in compounds and post-lexically. In fact, the problem of the distribution of vocalic quantity in post-lexical contexts constitutes a much bigger challenge for phonological theory, since it involves an unusual type of the interplay between phonological and morphosyntactic factors.

This chapter undertakes an overview of the structural conditions regulating the distribution of a phonological fortition process, raddoppiamento fonosintattico “phonosyntactic doubling”, in the Calabrian dialect of Cosenza, focusing on some particularly striking cases which also reveal the role of phases in constraining the application of RF. On the one hand, the data highlight the advantages of interpreting locality not just narrowly in terms of the three core structural configurations Spec-Head, Head-Head and Head-Comp, but also more broadly in terms of phasal domains, showing how different phonological realizations represent the spell-out of deep syntactic differences mapped at the interface between narrow syntax and PF (Phonological Form). On the other, the theoretical assumptions assumed here provide us with the key to understanding some intriguing empirical generalizations about the role of RF in signalling, among other things, informational structure content and binding relations, which, in turn, throw new light on current theoretical assumptions about clause structure and the nature of phases.

This paper provides new evidence that verb cluster formation in West Germanic takes place post-syntactically. Contrary to some previous accounts, I argue that cluster formation involves linearly adjacent morphosyntactic words and not syntactic sister nodes. The empirical evidence is drawn from Swiss German verb
doubling constructions where intriguing asymmetries arise between ascending and descending orders. The approach additionally solves the cluster puzzle with extraposition and topicalization, generates all of the crosslinguistically
attested six orders in the verbal complex and correctly predicts which orders are penetrable in which positions. On a more general level, the paper provides arguments for a derivational treatment of verb cluster formation and order variation and adduces important evidence in favor of a right-branching VP.

RÉSUMÉ Cette étude est une approche minimaliste de la consonne m considérée comme la seule nasale phonologique dans les langues Kwa. Elle rejette cette analyse étant donné que dans certaines de ces langues, notamment en Ebrié et en Avikam, m est la réalisation phonétique de l'implosive ɓ. S'appuyant sur les données empiriques de telles langues auxquelles s'ajoutent celles d'autres langues du même groupe, l'étude démontre dans une perspective minimaliste que m, dans toutes les langues Kwa où il a été retenu comme phonème, est en variation complémentaire avec ɓ qui est sa forme sous-jacente. ABSTRACT This study is a minimalist approach of the consonant m analyzed as the only phonological nasal in the Kwa languages. It rejects this analysis given that in some of these languages, in particular in Ebrié and in Avikam, m is the phonetic realization of the implosive ɓ. Relying onto the empirical data of such languages and those of other languages from the same linguistic group, the study demonstrates through a minimalist interpretation that m, in all the Kwa languages where it was retained as phoneme, is in a complementary distribution with ɓ which is its underlying structure.

This paper provides an analysis for the stress distribution of Mandarin phrases of the structure [V NP], [A NP], [AP (de) NP] and [NP N], and especially the more complex verb-embedded structures [NP [V N]], [[NP V] NP] and [[V NP] NP]. The analysis is based on Truckenbrodt’s (2006, 2012) Stress-XP theory, the general light noun phrase (nP) hypothesis, and the Mandarin-specific de-headed DP hypothesis. This paper also proposes a Stress Length Correspondence (SLC) criterion and argues that the stress assignment schemes it derives support the Stress-XP theory. A number of other related prosodic syntax issues in Chinese are discussed along the way, such as the means of stress realization, the compound vs. phrase distinction, and the difference between empty D head and implicit D head.

Word order variation in Romance and Bantu has been related to information structure portrayed in the different discourse functions of the sentential elements involved. Based on the distribution of new information focus in Romance and Bantu, this paper argues that discourse functions need not be directly encoded in syntax. The position defended here is that syntax generates all possible structures which are filtered out at the interface with the phonological component. The prosodic phrasing of these structures is what indicates focused constituents occurring in positions of prominence. The paramount significance of prosody for the determination of focus is particularly illustrated in those cases both in Romance and Bantu where, for syntactic reasons, change in word order is restricted but prosodic effects still accompany focus. The proposed interface approach to focus accounts for the variation in focus strategies and the intimate relation of focus to prosody which is attested in Romance and Bantu. Crucially, the evidence from Romance and Bantu is complementary. The Romance data provide the necessary syntactic evidence for not positing a designated focus position in the syntactic hierarchy for focus, whereas the Bantu data show that prosodic effects may emerge in varying ways, providing evidence for not linking a single syntactic position to a given prosodic effect. The paper in this respect highlights the similarities and differences of the role of prosody in indicating focus in stress versus tone languages.

One version of the copy theory of movement holds that syntactic traces are full-fledged constituents which undergo a PF-deletion rule. In this paper, I propose a constraint on this rule. The constraint says that the lower copy of a chain can be phonologically deleted only if it ends an XP. I show that this constraint, conjoined with proposals that have been made concerning phrase structure (Chomsky 1994) and the semantics of NP in classifier languages (Chierchia 1998), explains a variety of facts in Dutch, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Swedish and Vietnamese.

This paper examines phonological phrasing in the Kwa language Akan. Regressive [+ATR] vowel harmony between words (RVH) serves as a hitherto unreported diagnostic of phonological phrasing. In this paper I discuss VP-internal and NP-internal structures, as well as SVO(O) and serial verb constructions. RVH is a general process in Akan grammar, although it is blocked in certain contexts. The analysis of phonological phrasing relies on universal syntax–phonology mapping constraints whereby lexically headed syntactic phrases are mapped onto phonological phrases. Blocking contexts call for a domain-sensitive analysis of RVH assuming recursive prosodic structure which makes reference to maximal and non-maximal phonological phrases. It is proposed (i) that phonological phrase structure is isomorphic to syntactic structure in Akan, and (ii) that the process of RVH is blocked at the edge of a maximal phonological phrase; this is formulated in terms of a domain-sensitive CrispEdgeconstraint.

The apparent discourse phenomenon of echo questions requires a formal analysis. Examining echo questions in Russian, a multiple wh-fronting language, I show that an echoed wh-phrase may undergo movement to the left-peripheral position, unlike English. It is pointed out that there is a restriction in that an echoed wh-phrase cannot intervene between two fronted wh-phrases. The difference between Russian and English involves a syntactic explanation in terms of the availability of an escape hatch. Moreover, she argues that wh-impenetrability follows from Uriagereka’s (1999) Multiple Spell-Out theory that makes invisible the internal structure of a spelled-out syntactic object.

This paper focuses on the current synchronic interspeaker variation of the Northern Catalan negative expression "poc" (and its allomorph "poca") 'no, not', which is examined from a prosodic, pragmatic and syntactic standpoint. Firstly, it offers a general description of the diachronic evolution of the quantitative adverb "poc" and its first grammaticalisation towards a negative emphatic polarity particle. Secondly, it points to the prosodic, pragmatic and syntactic behaviour of "poc" in Modern Catalan and sets the differences between the two main values of this negator within the community of speakers that use it: 1) a prosodically non-neutral pragmatic activator, and 2) a prosodically neutral pragmatically unmarked negator (generally used in Girona and Figueres). These differences are taken as evidence in favour of a current reanalysis and/or grammaticalisation process of "poc/poca", in the latter speech variety, which involves its use as a negative head. Therefore, we put forward that in this variety "poc" has undergone a "specifier to head" grammaticalisation within PolP (thus, being an instance of van Gelderen's negative cycle). Last but not least, our argument is crucially supported by a phonetic test on intonation that proves, without a shred of doubt, that "poc" and "no" pattern alike from a prosodic viewpoint, whereas the intonation contours concerning "pla" (a Northern Catalan negative emphatic polarity particle 'NOT') clearly diverge in the same contexts. Taking into account the general understanding on the grammaticalisation process itself (mostly concerning the intervention of semantic bleaching, pragmatic unmarking, prosodic or intonational unmarkedness and syntactic reanalysis), we conclude that the loss of pragmatic activation and the use of "poc" in non-emphatic contexts can be taken as proofs of the grammaticalisation of "poc" into a PolP head.

Occitan and French are two Gallo-Romance languages that have been in a diglossic situation in Southern France for centuries. Couched in an Autosegmental-Metrical framework, the present thesis analyzes the prosody of Occitan-French bilinguals in their two languages, as compared to that of Northern French monolinguals or bilinguals whose Occitan is in contact with other languages (with Piedmontese and Italian, punctually with Catalan and Spanish). The contribution of this thesis is twofold: on the one hand, it provides the first description of the prosodic system of Occitan, which was an urgent task to complete, since native speakers are becoming rare; on the other hand, it shows how language contact has led Occitan and Southern French to converge into an intermediate prosodic system between Northern (standard) French and the other Romance languages like Catalan, Spanish or Italian. The data analyzed for this thesis are of two types: intonation questionnaires including 29 situations and fable summaries produced after listening to a recording in the target variety. We analyzed the intonation questionnaires of 81 Northern French speakers, 70 Southern French speakers and 58 Occitan speakers to compare the intonational phonology of these varieties and give a first approximation to intonational dialectal variation in Occitan. Our model for the interplay of phrasing and metrical structure was refined thanks to the observation of 62 fable summaries and 15 summaries were then selected for a cross-linguistic acoustic analysis. As far as intonational phonology is concerned, Occitan appears to align with the dominant language with which it is in contact. While the particular contours of Occitan for statements of the obvious and vocatives have been transferred to Southern French, very few divergences have been observed in other sentence types in France. By contrast, the Occitan dialects spoken outside of France present some different intonational patterns, which align with Catalan and Spanish in the case of Aranese Occitan, and with Italian and Piedmontese in the case of Cisalpine Occitan. In respect to prosodic phrasing and metrical structure, quantitative analyses of the data show that Occitan has adopted the Accentual Phrase (AP) of French as a domain for pitch accent distribution: in both Occitan and French, the syllable that receives phrasal stress, at most one syllable away from the right edge of the AP, is obligatorily marked by an increase in F0 (in prenuclear position), intensity and duration; an AP-initial pitch rise may be associated with secondary stress on the first syllable of the leftmost lexical word in the AP. However, the internal organization of the Accentual Phrase (AP) is different in Northern French and in the southern varieties. In Northern French, word stress was completely lost: primary stress is assigned post-lexically to the rightmost full syllable in the AP and APinternal words show no prominence at all. By contrast, in Occitan and Southern French, AP-internal words may display pitch movements, aligned with the syllable that bears word stress in Occitan and with the last full syllable of the word in Southern French. These results highlight the status of Occitan and Southern French as a bridge prosodic system within the Romance languages, presenting the metrical system typical of languages such as Catalan, Spanish, or Italian, but in which the adoption of the Northern French AP as domain for pitch accent distribution has somewhat weakened word stress, since its acoustic marking is optional inside APs. As a conclusion, the intonational phonology of Occitan tends to align with the dominant language. By contrast, we hypothesize that historically, while word stress was lost in Northern French, the metrical structure of Occitan was transferred to Southern French, retaining the general Romance organization in syllables, feet and prosodic words.

Access to file: http://www.tdx.cat/handle/10803/321597?locale-attribute=en

Lan honetan Lekeitioko hizkeran menpeko perpausetako azentu nagusia non kokatzen den aztertzen dugu, asimetria interesgarri bat erakutsiz. -ela perpaus barruan dagoen aditzaren aurreko hitz azentugabeak foku azentua jaso dezakeen bitartean, -en, -enean, -enétik, -elako perpaus barrukoak ezin du azentua eraman. Enpirikoki baieztatu dugu kontrastea gertatu egiten dela, eta kontrastea azaltzeko proposatzen dugu auzia ez datzala osagarri-adjunktu bereizketan, baizik eta zein fase-eremu sintaktikoari eragiten dion azentu ezarketak menpeko perpausetan. Horretarako, iradokitzen dugu -ela izan ezik, beste konplementatzaileak posposiziodunak direla eta, ondorioz, fase desberdinetan ezartzen dela azentua.

This paper investigates a series of Germanic verb constructions, which appear to involve the ‘wrong’ morphology on one or more of the verbs involved: Norwegian parasitic participles, Frisian upward and downward parasitic participles, and the German Skandal construction. I provide an explicit syntactic account unifying the phenomena and deriving the differences from independent differences among the languages. These apparently odd constructions are shown to be subject to specific distributional restrictions which are fully in line with standard grammatical principles of the languages under consideration. The account is based on a top-down definition of Agree, namely the claim that an unvalued feature is valued by the closest c-commanding element with the appropriate valued feature. I demonstrate that this view allows for a uniform treatment of the morphological and syntactic properties of these constructions, which, so far, have been assumed to be unrelated. Lastly, I argue that different word orders in verb clusters can be derived either by syntactic movement (in which case locality conditions have to be obeyed and new Agree(ment) relations are formed) or by PF-linearization of sister nodes (in which case no locality effects are observed and no new Agree(ment) relations are established).

In this paper we provide a derivational, minimalist account of the construction of particle and prefix verbs in German. In particular, we focus on the different stress patterns associated with particle and prefix verbs and on the positioning of the bound morpheme zu ‘to’ in particle and prefix verbs. Building upon an earlier proposal put forward by Biskup & Putnam (2009), we assume that particle and prefix verbs are derived from similar derivational mechanisms. They differ only with respect to whether or not the p-element (i.e., preposition or particle) incorporates into the root. This distinction is the base for the different behavior of prefix and particle verbs with respect to the stress pattern and the position of the infinitival marker zu. Since German particles are prepositions that remain in situ in the prepositional phrase, they allow zu to intervene between them and the verb. For this reason, they constitute a strong prosodic word and bear the primary stress in the particle...

Este artigo analisa a variação da duração de sílabas em diferentes domínios prosódicos e pretende oferecer mais ferramentas que permitam analisar estruturas sintáticas através de pistas fonológicas. Nossos resultados apontam que sílabas pós-tônicas em final de enunciado são significantemente mais longas do que nos outros domínios. Eles também mostram que, enquanto o tipo de vogal não afeta a duração das sílabas átonas, o vozeamento das consoantes afetou os resultados. Finalmente, não há variação de resultados a depender de as palavras serem parte do léxico ou logatomas.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Domínios Prosódicos. Duração. Interface Fonologia-Sintaxe.ABSTRACT This paper discusses syllable duration with respect to different prosodic domains and presents additional tools to analyze syntactic structures through phonological cues. Our results show that post-tonic syllables are longer at the intonational phrase boundary but not at other prosodic boundaries. The results also show that the type of ...

This paper investigates syntax-prosody interaction in the context of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) clitics. I show that clitic mapping from the syntactic to the prosodic structure depends on the syntactic complexity of the host at the output of the syntax.

Tone as a distinctive feature used to differentiate not only words but also clause types, is a characteristic feature of Bantu languages. In this paper we show that Bemba relatives can be marked with a low tone in place of a segmental relative marker. We treat this low tone as a morpheme rather than as just triggering a change in tone pattern that can then be related to relativization. The low tone strategy of relativization, which imposes a restrictive reading of relatives, manifests a phonological phrasing that requires the head noun to be phrased together with the relative clause that it modifies as opposed to non-restrictives where this is not the case. The paper shows that the resultant phonological phrasing favours a head-raising analysis of relativization where the head noun is considered to be inside CP. Despite the syntactic use of the relative tonal morpheme we see that it is also subject to purely phonological constraints that results in its being unable to be used to mark headless relatives. This paper therefore highlights the phonology-syntax connection and shows that phonology can directly inform syntactic analyses. 2. Our data sources are both from informants, for which we thank Fred Kula and Honoria Mutale, and from written sources. Our principal written sources are Van Sambeek (1955), Sharman (1956), Sharman and Meeusen (1955), Givón (1972) and Oger (1979). Bemba (M42) is a Bantu language spoken in the Northern and Copperbelt provinces of Zambia. 3. Although our examples only use one of these forms it seems that the two are in free variation. 4. The following abbreviations are used (numbers in glosses refer to agreement classes): i i Preliminary page and line breaks jall28-2 -2007/9/6 16:25-125-#6-eyrich i i i i i i Phonological and syntactic phrasing in Bemba relatives 125 7. The typical SV(O) order becomes V(O)S in the inverted case. See Demuth and Harford (1999), Harford and Demuth (1999) for discussion of subject inverted object relatives.

The central claim of Dynamic Syntax is that the structure of natural languages reflects the way hearers use natural language to construct representations of content. The DS model aims to show how information provided by words is used incrementally to build increasingly complex semantic representations, a process modelled as tree growth. Due to this incremental perspective, the linear surface order of words plays a much larger role in syntactic analysis in DS than in other models with more emphasis on hierarchical structures or conflicting constraints. Furthermore, the model reflects that on-line choices have to be made about the contribution of a particular piece of information to the overall structure to be developed, and that in some cases, the eventual contribution of some information is not yet known at the time it is encountered. In the formal model, this is reflected by the use of Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the LAGB Annual Meeting at the University of Newcastle and at the Conference on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Relative Clauses at the University of Cambridge. We are grateful for comments from the audiences at these conferences, as well as from Lisa Cheng, Ruth Kempson and Jochen Zeller. All errors remain ours.