Volume 27, Issue 4

In Russian, the phonological diagnostics for prosodic words conflict when applied to compounds. On the one hand, compounds can have multiple stresses ( oboròn-o-sposóbnost' ‘defense-linker-capability’), whereas single-root words can only have a single stress. On the other hand, non-stress rules such as word-final devoicing and vowel reduction treat compounds as single prosodic words. Based on this and other kinds of evidence, I demonstrate that compounds are indeed single prosodic words, though they are required to have a stress for each sub-stem. Secondary stress patterns in compounds also provide some clues as to the location of default stress in what is an almost entirely lexical stress system.

Assuming with Ting (Journal of East Asian Linguistics 12: 121–139, 2003) that the derivation of the particle suo in (Mandarin) Chinese targets V/I/T categories on a par with Romance pronominal clitics, I investigate the comparable climbing phenomenon of suo in Chinese. An important generalization that emerges from this comparison is that in contrast to the monoclausal properties in Romance clitic climbing, the climbing of suo exhibits properties of a biclausal configuration. I conclude that clitic climbing crosslinguistically is not necessarily associated with restructuring effects and argue that the facts of climbing of suo is best captured by a head movement approach to clitic placement first advocated by Kayne (Null subjects and clitic climbing, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989b, Linguistic Inquiry 22: 647–686, 1991).

In this article, a prosodic domain located between the prosodic word and the phonological phrase is argued for (the prosodic word group – PWG). This constituent groups the members of several types of compound-like expressions, but does not play a special part in the prosodic organization of clitics, and thus is argued to be (partially) distinct from the old clitic group (Hayes, The prosodic hierarchy in meter, Academic Press, 1989; Nespor and Vogel, Prosodic phonology, Foris, 1986). The PWG is shown to play a role in the phonology of compound-like expressions in a great number of languages, belonging to different linguistic families. Evidence is multifarious, coming from segmental, tonal, duration and prominence related phenomena. Crucially, evidence is also offered against an analysis resorting to recursive prosodic words – e.g., prominence patterns at the levels of the Prosodic Word (PW) and PWG may be reversed; phonological phenomena distinguishing the two domains show a difference in kind and not just in strength (Ladd, Intonational phonology, Cambridge University Press, 1996/2008; Frota, Prosody and focus in European Portuguese. Phonological phrasing and intonation, Garland Publishing, 2000).