Prosodic phrasing of Chichewa relative clauses

Abstract

Earlier studies of Chichewa phrasal prosody – Kanerva (Focus and phrasing in Chichewa phonology, Garland, 1990) and Truckenbrodt (Phonological phrases: Their relation to syntax, focus and prominence, MIT, 1995, Linguistic Inquiry 30: 219–255, 1999, Linguistische Berichte 203: 273–296, 2005) – claim that Phonological Phrases in this language can potentially be quite large, as an entire maximal syntactic constituent – for example, a verb and all its complements – is parsed into a single Phonological Phrase in their analysis. This proposal predicts that even long and internally complex syntactic constituents will be parsed into a single Phonological Phrase. Relative clause constructions provide the ideal context for testing the proposal. However, neither Kanerva's (Focus and phrasing in Chichewa phonology, Garland, 1990) study of Chichewa prosodic phrasing nor Watkins's (A grammar of Chichewa: A Bantu language of British Central Africa, University of Chicago, 1937) and Mchombo's (The syntax of Chichewa, Cambridge University Press, 2004) grammars include sufficient examples to get a complete picture of their prosodic properties. Our study first presents a survey of prosodic phrasing in four relative clause constructions, then it provides an optimality theory (OT) analysis of the data. We show that Truckenbrodt's (Phonological phrases: Their relation to syntax, focus and prominence, MIT, 1995) OT analysis must be revised to account for the correlation we find in this data between syntactic phase edges and prosodic phrasing. Following work like Chen (Phonology Yearbook 4: 109–149, 1987), we show that the complement/adjunct distinction is an additional factor conditioning prosodic phrasing.