Volume 27, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Mapping asymmetries: Phonology, syntax and information structure

This paper discusses conceptual aspects of a Multiple Spell-Out theory of the syntax-phonology interface where a domain of spell-out is a prosodic domain. I claim that economy considerations, which have contributed to the development of syntactic and phonological studies of generative grammar, also contribute to the study of syntax-phonology mapping. I argue that computational efficiency should be formulated in an explicit manner so that it has empirical effects on the mapping. Specifically, I propose an efficiency condition, which makes the mapping computationally efficient by prohibiting a prosodic domain from being modified in the course of mapping. I show that the so-called restructuring of phonological phrases allegedly induced by syntactic branching not only violates the proposed condition but also has empirical problems, and that it should be analyzed purely phonologically, without considering syntactic factors.

In this paper we analyze the intonational properties of a type of focus construction that has been understudied, represented by answers to wh -questions in which the constituent that fills the variable does not do so exhaustively, that is, it does not provide an exhaustive answer because the speaker cannot commit to asserting that the other potential alternative candidates to fill the variable are cancelled. This type of narrow focus, Non-Exhaustive Narrow Focus (NENF), is different from Exhaustive Narrow Focus (ENF), in which a constituent fills the variable of the question exhaustively, with a concomitant cancellation of the rest of the focal alternatives. Our claim is that natural languages have the means to distinguish ENF and NENF unambiguously through prosodic means. In the present study, we show that speakers of (Northern Bizkaian) Basque assign particular intonational features to answers to wh -questions that should be interpreted non-exhaustively. In our experiment, we measured peak scaling of accents in the subject and the verb in ENF and NENF utterances. The results show that NENF is distinguished from ENF in having a pitch accent on the verb with a higher F0 value, almost as if the verb were focalized. In fact, we compared the intonational patterns of NENF with Verum Focus constructions, in which the polarity of the event expressed by the verb is focalized, and there were no significant differences in the verbal peaks in NENF and VF. There were no significant differences in peak scaling in the subject's stressed syllable between ENF and NENF, and neither were there any differences between NENF and VF. The paper offers a semantic analysis of the differences between ENF and NENF, by claiming that NENF is a split focus construction, in which both the subject and the polarity (or rather, the pairing between the subject and the polarity) constitute the focus of the utterance.

There is no doubt that recursion exists in syntax, but whether this is reflected in prosody is still an open question. In this paper, the prosody of sentences with syntactically recursive center-embedded clauses is examined empirically in two languages. On the basis of the results, we argue for recursion of higher prosodic domains in German. Evidence for this proposal comes from the F0 range of the matrix clause, which is larger if embedded material is present. It is both higher in the high regions and lower in the low regions than in matrix clauses without embedded material. A second piece of evidence relates to pitch scaling of high tones at the boundaries between clauses, which is sensitive to syntactic embedding. In Hindi, by contrast, no evidence for embedding of prosodic phrases could be found. Prosodic phrases are concatenated and are in a downstep relationship to each other, regardless of the syntactic structure of the sentence. The difference between the prosodic structure of German and Hindi is tentatively explained by their different intonational properties: German is an intonation language with lexical stress and Hindi is a phrase language without lexical stress, in which tonal structures are phrase-based.

Nuclear accents have two interesting properties. First, they have a projective property, i.e., they may refer to a focus domain that encompasses a higher syntactic projection. Second, at least for some languages, nuclear accents may have an interpretational property, i.e., they may have alternative realizations that reveal particular interpretations, such as contrast, correction, surprise, etc. The present article examines the interaction between the projective and the interpretational properties of nuclear pitch accents. Based on an experimental study on Greek, we show that the nuclear accent that is interpreted as ‘contrastive’ refers to a local focus domain, i.e., it is not projected to higher layers of the constituent structure. Furthermore, our experimental findings show that these properties interact with syntactic and prosodic markedness, in a way that the canonical word order and the unmarked accentual structure are felicitous in a larger array of contexts than the marked syntactic and accentual configurations.

Based on data from French, Japanese and Korean, this article lays out an approach to wh -questions' intervention effects that questions the very existence of this phenomenon. It is assumed that the property that makes all the “interveners” into one natural class is their anti-given nature. Taking into account wh -questions' syntax, phonology and information structure, it is shown that although the three investigated languages vary with respect to what forces wh -fronting in the presence of an anti-given item, prosodic structure always plays a central part.

Ā-scrambling in Dutch gives rise to ungrammaticality if it places an element subordinate in information structure in a position where it c-commands a superordinate element, even though a base-generated configuration of this type is well-formed. We propose an account of this phenomenon based on two claims: (i) Ā-scrambling is a scope-marking movement and (ii) scope-extending movement creates a barrier for QR. The bulk of our evidence comes from interactions between topics and foci, but we also consider interactions between foci that are in a superordinate/subordinate relation from an information-structural perspective. Exploration of the focus data reveals a further constraint that affects foci accompanied by a focus-sensitive particle: their surface c-command relations must directly correspond to their information-structural position, even if no Ā-scrambling takes place. We argue that this is because QR cannot pied-pipe focus-sensitive particles, possibly because it involves feature movement.