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The morphological structure of a complex word determines how the constituent morphemes of a word are realized phonetically. The phonological structure of a complex word reflects its morphological structure, but is not isomorphic to that structure. Phonology plays a role in the selection of one from a set of competing affixes. This can be modelled in terms of phonological output conditions.

This chapter claims that syntax constructs the basis for a mapping into prosodic structure, using an appropriate algorithm, based on prosodic principles. As a test case, another instance is taken into consideration: Italian restructuring verbs. It also examines the problems that these verbs raise for the interface between phonology and syntax. The constituency test provides evidence that two different syntactic structures should be associated with restructuring verbs, whereas the phonological level, the various rules argue favoring a single configuration. The chapter discusses different algorithms which have been proposed in the literature to account for this non-isomorphism between syntactic structure and phonological structure. It demonstrates that those which are driven by syntactic principles do not make the right predictions in accounting for phonological constituency which is not the case for the algorithm suggested in Ghini (1993). In this algorithm, phonological constituency is mainly driven by prosodic principles.

This chapter investigates the relationship between the phonological or prosodic structure of a spoken utterance and its syntactic, semantic, and information structural analysis. A full theory of the form-meaning correspondence must account for the effect of prosodic features such as intonation patterns on interpretation. In line with other work in LFG that is concerned with the contribution made by phonology or prosody to grammatical structure and interpretation, the existence of a separate level of prosodic structure or p-structure within the projection architecture is assumed. The chapter reviews previous LFG approaches to prosody and the place of prosodic structure within the grammar (Section 11.3), before presenting the approach that is adopted which relies on analyzing a string as having two distinct aspects: one syntactic, the s-string, the other phonological/ prosodic, the p-string (Section 11.4). This approach is exemplified with an account of declarative questions and prosodic focus marking.

Prosodic structure features prominently in work on metrical stress, in intonational phonology and prosodic phonology (where it provides the domain for segmental and supra-segmental processes), but specifics vary widely in the literature. Following Truckenbrodt, a simple version of the prosodic hierarchy, using phonological phrases, intermediate phrases, and intonational phrases above the word level is used, related to syntax by a small set of ranked, violable constraints; a prosodic constituent’s metrically strongest element, its head, may serve as an anchoring point for pitch accents, subject to a single ‘stress-to-accent’ constraint. Sometimes a more articulated structure is called for, involving a limited kind of recursion in prosodic categories, or perhaps even label-less recursion of a single unspecific category. The rules of syntax-to-prosody mapping actually predict when these more complex structures arise. Generalizations introduced earlier—integration, nuclear accent placement, optional accenting—find their proper place in this prosodically more elaborate setting.

It is particularly significant to examine the intonational systems of typologically diverse languages in light of renewed interest in ‘intonational universals’. As yet, only a handful of indigenous Australian languages possess significant intonational descriptions. This chapter examines the intonational phonology of six closely-related varieties of a Northern Australian language, Bininj Gun-wok, also known as Mayali. It then outlines transcription conventions that are designed to transcribe significant prosodic events in this language and its various dialects.

This chapter investigates the nature of postposing in Japanese through a detailed comparison with its Turkish counterpart. Two types of postposing are proposed, one carried out by syntactic movement and another taking place in the phonological component. Turkish has the former type, whereas Japanese has both, although the availability of postposing by syntactic movement is limited in Japanese. The chapter argues that postposing in the phonological component is crucially regulated by prosodic factors, while interacting with what happens in the syntax, and that this dual nature accounts for the complex properties of Japanese postposing. It is also claimed that the difference between Japanese and Turkish with respect to postposing arises from a difference in the morphological properties of the functional head C.

This chapter addresses the issue of how to relate focus and stress in English sentences, particularly within the framework of the (Revised) Extended Standard Theory. Specifically, it shows that, with some refinement, the grammatical model of Chomsky and Lasnik (1977) accommodates an insightful analysis of the relationship between focus and stress, while preserving the Autonomous Systems view of Hale et al. (1977). The chapter is organized as follows. Section 4.2 drives Prosodic Structure from surface structure by the rules of accent placement. Section 4.3 is concerned with the assignment of focus on S-structures. Section 4.4 suggests a number of additional rules of Discourse Grammar whose function is to define contextual conditions for the interpretation of focus as presentational, contrastive, emphatic, etc. Section 4.5 summarizes the results and compares the framework developed in this chapter with a number of others that have appeared in the linguistic literature.

This chapter presents data from six children learning American English at two developmental points: first word use and the end of the single-word period, when templates typically first begin to be identifiable. The chapter lays out procedures for identifying prosodic structures and variants and also consonant inventories, which give insight into the child’s resources for word production. Analysis of the most frequently used prosodic structures is followed by an analysis of each child’s data to permit template identification, based primarily on high proportionate use and adaptation. A developmental comparison of the two data sets shows continued reliance, by all the children, on the default or simplest CV structure, but advances in use of one- and two-syllable structures with codas. Consonant variegation is found to be the single greatest challenge for early word formation.

This chapter presents cross-linguistic data from two children each from the language groups represented in Chapter 4. The child’s consonantal resources are evaluated, with examples of the child’s word forms. This is followed by an account of the child’s prosodic structures and their relative frequency of use. Active template use is evaluated, based in part on the extent to which the child adapts words to fit those structures. A correlation is found between the children’s production of consonant matches and the extent of variegation in their word forms. Finally, an overview is provided of template use in the 18 children whose patterns have been considered in detail. Consonant harmony is found to be the pattern most frequently deployed, but a VCV pattern is used by five of the children (French, Finnish, Italian, Welsh). The pattern is traced to accentual aspects of the ambient language.

The earlier rules for relating syntactic focus and givenness marking to accenting are replaced by mapping principles that relate to prosodic structure as introduced in the previous chapter. The resulting picture is similar in spirit and empirical coverage to the purely accent-based incarnation, but is more detailed, accurate, and, arguably, elegant. Subtle effects of focussing and deaccenting follow from the interaction of a small number of general constraints, applied to the kinds of focus-related representations introduced earlier. One striking feature of the resulting picture is that many exceptions to the popular equation focussed=accented, given/backgrounded=unaccented, both known and novel, are systematically predicted. Finally, by giving stress its proper place alongside pitch accenting, an account of so-called Second Occurrence Focus becomes possible; such a ‘focus without accent’ is now a phrasal stress which, by virtue of general constraints on the realization of focus domains, cannot be associated with a pitch accent.

This chapter describes the methodology of studying intonation from data collection (in the lab and in the field) to data analysis within the Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonational phonology. For data analysis, the chapter provides ways to characterize intonational tunes in terms of distinctive tonal categories and prosodic structure.

The predictions of multiple interacting Prosodically Defective Morphemes are discussed in this chapter. For one, there are instances where several morphemes in a language are lexically marked exceptions to an MLM process. This can follow, it is shown, if those morphemes are prosodically defective themselves. A very interesting instance of such an effect can be found in Aymara where a so-called ’rescuer morpheme’ exists whose only surface effect is to block an expected MLM pattern. On the other hand, there are cases where lexical allomorphy between different MLM processes can be found. It is shown that again the exceptional behaviour of some morphemes in the presence of a triggering Prosodically Defective Morpheme follows if those morphemes themselves are prosodically defective. The chapter hence strengthens the role of phonological representation and shifts the burden of various (apparently morphological) idiosyncratic lexical information to the phonological representation of the morphemes in question.

Bert Vaux and Andrew Wolfe have proposed a very strict theory of syllabification and the prosodic status of unsyllabified segments, arguing that a phoneme must either be syllabified directly or be associated to a higher prosodic level via an appendix structure. This chapter examines one pattern of infixation and one pattern of reduplication in Nxa/amxcin which may be completely agnostic about prosodic structure. It also considers a reduplication pattern in Thao to show that a syllabification scheme utilizing degenerate syllables is necessary to account for the pattern. Vaux and Wolfe’s explicit rejection of degenerate syllables raises the question of whether their strict claims about the nature of the syllable are plausible. The chapter thus argues for a further investigation of their examples in order to fully determine their importance in constructing a theory of syllabification for phonology.

Resumptive pronouns in Vata, as in Swedish, pattern like gaps with respect to certain diagnostics, particularly with respect to weak crossover and islands. This chapter develops an analysis of Vata resumptives as syntactically inactive resumptives, which are nonetheless licensed semantically like syntactically active resumptives, as found in Irish and Hebrew. I first review some of the key resumptive pronoun data in Vata and then provide an analysis along the same lines as those in previous chapters.

This chapter provides a concise yet valuable introduction to the formal grammatical framework utilized in the work, Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). It first explains the two original components of the theory, constituent structure and functional structure, discussing the cross-linguistic variation attested in c-structure configuration in contrast with the cross-linguistic uniformity of f-structure. Secondly, the semantic formalism, glue semantics, is introduced, and the particular combination of glue with Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) is explained. Finally, the remaining components of the LFG architecture are introduced, with particular focus on information structure, the string, and prosodic structure.

The prosodic structure of Dutch words presents a conundrum because closed syllables require a foot head, while long vowels apparently do not project a foot. In other quantity-sensitive languages, long vowels are heavy (bimoraic), and will be in a stressed syllable (type A), while closed syllables may need to be heavy and stressed (type B). This chapter focuses on vowel duration, syllable quantity, and stress in Dutch. It discusses bimoricity and the role of quantity in the phonological representation of Dutch vowels. The chapter shows that moraic representations of vowels are part of the lexical phonology of Dutch and that a description of Dutch word prosodic structure is impossible unless the moraic structure is specified.

Effects of prosodic structure on surface phonetics are modeled in AP/TD in two ways: 1) via a set of PI and Mu_T adjustment mechanisms used to model lengthening effects at boundaries and on prominent syllables, and 2) via a hierarchy of coupled syllable, cross-word foot, and phrase oscillators, used to model poly-subconstituent shortening effects, and to control overall speech rate. These mechanisms are challenged by 1) findings presented in previous chapters that suggest that longer durations associated with boundaries and prominences are due to longer surface duration specifications, 2) findings presented here that show that polysyllabic shortening does not affect all words in an utterance, inconsistent with an oscillator-based mechanism that controls all aspects of any produced utterance, and 3) findings relating to speech rate presented in previous chapters which suggest that speech rate specifications relate to surface durations, rather than to planning oscillator frequencies. Patterns of speech timing presented in this chapter thus suggest that there are reasons to be uncertain whether periodicity is a major factor in speech motor control in typical speaking circumstances, and therefore call into question the use of suprasegmental oscillators.