Elisabeth Selkirk

The Interaction of Constraints on Prosodic Phrasing

The notion that the prosodic phrasing structure of a sentence plays a crucial role in organizing the segmental, tonal and prominence structures of a sentence’s phonological representation and its phonetic implementation as well is quite widely assumed in work in both phonology and phonetics. It is also quite widely assumed that this prosodic phrasing structure is independent of, but related to, the syntactic and/or information structure of a sentence. Yet no consensus has emerged within the various traditions of research on prosodic phrasing concerning the nature of the relation between prosodic phrasing and these other distinct types of grammatical representation. Certain approaches foreground the role for syntactic constraints on prosodic phrasing1, others the role for constraints appealing to aspects of information structure2. There are, moreover, properly phonological constraints on prosodic phrasing which ignore these interface representations3. An adequate theory has to recognize the full diversity of constraints on prosodic phrasing, and in addition, make explicit the manner in which these constraints interact4.

Phase theory and prosodic spellout : The case of verbs

Abstract 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.

Syntax and Downstep in Japanese

Two distinct phenomena of Japanese sentence tonology appear to depend on surface syntactic structure. The first is Downstep, a change in pitch register which is manifested as a marked lowering in the stretch of an utterance following an accented syllable. The second is Initial Lowering, a rise to the second mora of a word, ascribed to the presence of a High tone on that second mora preceded by a Low tone at the word edge. (The characterizations we give of these two well-known phenomena are due to Poser (1984), Beckman and Pierrehumbert (1986) and Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988), hereafter PPB when referred to together.) That the downstepping of a syllable is a function — direct or indirect — of the syntactic relation between the word containing it and a preceding accented word can be illustrated simply by comparing the representations in (1) and (2). The two sentences contain identical sequences of accented lexical items. These words are organized into different surface phrase structures, and the pattern of Downstep differs accordingly.

Government and tonal phrasing in Papago

Our task in this paper will be to characterise the distribution of the (L)HL pattern in Papago sentences. Our analysis is that the phonological representation of a sentence of Papago consists of a sequence of one or more tonal phrases, and that (L)HL is the pattern assigned to a tonal phrase. This tonal phrasing -i.e. the beginnings and ends of individual tonal phrases will be indicated by parentheses in the tonal tier, as in (i) and (2). The association of the (L)HL pattern within each tonal phrase is captured by simple rules of the phonology, to be described in ?2. Thus the description of the syntax of Papago intonation contours will centre on the tonal phrasing itself, and on the manner in which it is determined with respect to surface syntactic structure. What we are going to show in this paper is that the mapping of syntactic

On The Nature of Phonological Representation

Publisher Summary Linguists have long debated this question, and at present still agree (in their vast majority) that a unit the size of the segment or phoneme must be posited. Perhaps, less universally accepted, but nonetheless prevalent, is the notion that segments decompose into an unordered set of distinctive features. As for phonological units above the level of the segment, the one that has most often enjoyed some status in linguistic theory is the syllable, and currently it, too, is acquiring increasingly wide acceptance. In each case, such units of phonological analysis are given a place in linguistic theory on the ground that without them, significant linguistic generalizations cannot be captured. Units such as the feature, the segment (or phoneme), and the syllable have figured in models of speech production and perception as well. Though, it is not obviously true that units of linguistic theory, a theory of competence, should necessarily have a role in theories of performance, clearly such units stand as the foremost and most serious candidates for units of performance theories. Thus, much research in speech production and perception has either assumed the existence of these units, or has directly sought evidence for their existence, in models of the processing of speech.

Syntax–Phonology Interface

The bulk of evidence concerning the syntax–phonology interface shows an influence of syntax on phonology. The domain structure for sentence-level phonological and phonetic phenomena, which forms part of the surface phonological representation (PR) of the sentence, is defined through an interaction of two types of constraints: syntax–prosodic structure interface constraints, which call for certain properties of the surface syntactic representation of the sentence (PF) to be reflected in domain structure in PR, and prosodic structure markedness constraints, which call for the surface prosodic structure to display patterns of unmarked prosodic structure. The effects of prosodic markedness constraints argue against direct access theories, which see phonological phenomena as defined directly on the surface syntax. Distinguishing PF and PR raises the question whether PF is input to the phonological component, with PR the output, as in standard models of generative grammar, or whether there may be mutual influence. Current models of grammar would countenance effects in the other direction, with the possibility of phonological principles constraining the range of acceptable surface syntactic representations, and research is beginning to explore this area.