Volume 24, Issue 2-3

The articles collected in this issue were presented at the Workshop on Prosodic Phrasing in April 2006. The workshop was hosted by the Casa de Convalescència-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and held in conjunction with the 29th GLOW Colloquium . The meeting proved to be a great success in bringing together scholars from around the world interested in a variety of issues related to prosodic phrasing, such as the relationship between prosody and syntax, the relationship between prosody, intonation and information structure, and the relationship between prosodic structure and pitch accent distribution or rhythmic properties. Also discussed was the question of how prosody is processed, as well as the phonetic modelling of phrasing (i.e., the different phonetic cues to phrasing levels). The eight articles selected for this issue deal with these various aspects from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.

In this article we will explore the consequences of adopting recent proposals by Chomsky, according to which the syntactic derivation proceeds in terms of phases. The notion of phase – through the associated notion of spellout – allows for an insightful theory of the fact that syntactic constituents receive default phrase stress not across the board, but as a function of yet-to-be-explicated conditions on their syntactic context. We will see that the phonological evidence requires us to modify somewhat the theory of which functional categories actually define a phase. Patterns of default, syntax-determined, phrase stress are argued to result from prosodic spellout requiring the highest phrase in the spellout domain to correspond to a major prosodic phrase in phonological representation, and carry major phrase stress.

The article discusses interactions between syntactic derivation, semantic scopal relations, and prosodic phrasing in Japanese. I claim that the Major Phrase (MaP) is a result of the mapping of Multiple Spell-Out (MSO) domains onto prosody. I also claim that a Focus Intonation (FI), a prosodic domain triggered by focus, is created independently of MaP phrasing, contrary to previously proposed analyses, in which a FI is created by modifying MaP phrasing. The interactions between prosodic phrasing and semantic scope can be better explained by distinguishing between MaP and FI. I claim that quantifiers and their scopes are sensitive to MaP boundaries, while focus-related scope-taking elements such as wh-phrase and negative polarity items are sensitive to FI domains. This generalization is explained under the MSO analysis of MaP/FI formation proposed in this article.

This study brings empirical data from Hebrew to support Selkirk's claim that prosodic phrasing is the result of an interaction of syntactic and phonological constraints. Employing a recently devised protocol, a production experiment elicited contextually disambiguated utterances of the relative clause attachment ambiguity construction. Satisfying the syntactic alignment constraint ( Align R XP ) and the phonological length constraints ( BinMin and BinMax ) would result in different prosodic phrasings for this syntactically ambiguous construction, permitting a test of the ranking of these constraints. Two types of data analysis suggest that in Hebrew the syntactic and phonological constraints are strictly ranked: In a context where the two types of constraints are in conflict, the alignment constraint is dominant; when the alignment constraint is vacuously satisfied, effects of the lower-ranked length constraints come into play. Together, these experimental findings illustrate the descriptive value of the constraint ranking hypothesis for prosodic phrasing.

Bantu languages are renowned as tone languages that utilize this suprasegmental feature not only on the lexical level to distinguish lexical items, but also on the grammatical level to distinguish clause types. This article investigates one such use of grammatical tone in relative clauses in Bemba where a low tone can be used in place of a segmental relative marker. This low tone relative morpheme functions in conjunction with phrase boundary tone indicated on the head noun and which entails either restrictive or non-restrictive interpretations of relatives. Considering a mapping of XPs to major phonological phrases in the syntax-prosody interface, the resultant phonological phrasing in relatives influences the choice of syntactic structure. In the case at hand, a head-raising analysis provides an optimal mapping between syntax and prosody for restrictives. Further, a more direct influence of phonology on syntax can be seen in a perception-based model like Dynamic Syntax where the on-line building of syntactic trees can gain import from phonological information.

The article discusses penultimate lengthening and the finality restriction in Northern Sotho, a Bantu language of South Africa. These suprasegmental rules crucially refer to prosodic structure in the definition of their domain of application. Relying partially on acoustic evidence, the article shows that the prosodic domains at whose right edges lengthening and the finality restriction apply are co-extensive and that they can be characterized as Intonational Phrase. By investigating the contexts in which lengthening and the finality restriction apply, the article argues that the right edge of the Intonational Phrase in Northern Sotho is aligned with the right edge of the syntactic InfP. The findings of this article match the patterns of phrasing reported for the Bantu languages Haya and Kinyambo. The languages differ, however, in the phonetic cues employed for phrasing. The article thus contributes to comparative work across Bantu languages in what concerns phonetic cues to phrasing as well as relevant constraints on the phonology-syntax mapping.

This article investigates the relationship between the global and local durational properties of an utterance. We show that languages that are similar in terms of their global durational properties are also similar in terms of their local durational properties. However, languages that differ globally also differ locally. We illustrate this with three varieties of South African English. We show that South African English L1 and Afrikaans English both pattern with stress-timed languages and both apply phrase-final lengthening. Tswana English, however, patterns with syllable-timed languages, and does not apply phrase-final lengthening.

This article explores the relationship between prosodic structure and pitch accent distribution in the context of empirical evidence from spoken Egyptian Arabic (EA), a language in which every content word routinely bears a pitch accent. In languages with more sparse pitch accent distribution, this has been explained in terms of obligatory accentuation of the heads of prosodic constituents at the phonological phrase level. Evidence from a corpus of EA narrative speech indicates that although the distribution of pitch accents in EA cannot be attributed to the distribution of heads of phonological phrases, it can be analyzed in terms of the distribution of another prosodic constituent, the Prosodic Word. This supports the general claim that there is a link between pitch accent distribution and the distribution of prosodic constituents, but suggests there is cross-linguistic variation in which constituent level of the Prosodic Hierarchy functions as the domain of pitch accent distribution.

Adopting an eyetracking paradigm, we investigated the role of H*L, L*HL, L*H, H*LH, and deaccentuation at the intonational phrase-final position in online processing of information status in British English in natural speech. The role of H*L, L*H and deaccentuation was also examined in diphonesynthetic speech. It was found that H*L and L*HL create a strong bias towards newness, whereas L*H, like deaccentuation, creates a strong bias towards givenness. In synthetic speech, the same effect was found for H*L, L*H and deaccentuation, but it was delayed. The delay may not be caused entirely by the difference in the segmental quality between synthetic and natural speech. The pitch accent H*LH, however, appears to bias participants' interpretation to the target word, independent of its information status. This finding was explained in the light of the effect of durational information at the segmental level on word recognition.