This chapter shows that both Match and Align constraints are needed to account for an asymmetry in Japanese syntax-to-prosody mapping. In Japanese, four-word left-branching syntactic phrases undergo prosodic rebracketing, such that the first pair and second pair of words form distinct phonological phrases, while four-word right-branching syntactic phrases are matched to isomorphic phonological phrases. Match Theory is shown to be unable to explain this asymmetry, whereas Align constraints do not account for matching effects in recursive phonological phrases. Japanese is analyzed as involving the interaction of Match and Align with binarity constraints favoring phonological rebracketing. This indicates that both Match and Align are present in the universal set of syntax-prosody mapping constraints responsible for phonological phrasing.

Much recent work on the syntax-prosody interface has been based in Optimality Theory. The typical analysis explicitly considers only a small number of candidates that could reasonably be expected to be optimal under some ranking, often without an explicit definition of GEN. Manually generating all the possible candidates, however, is prohibitively time-consuming for most input structures – the Too Many Candidates Problem. Existing software for OT uses regular expressions for automated generation and evaluation of candidates. However, regular expressions are too low in the Chomsky Hierarchy of language types to represent trees of arbitrary size, which are needed for syntax-prosody work. This paper presents a new computational tool for research in this area: Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory (SPOT). For a given input, SPOT generates all prosodic parses under certain assumptions about GEN, and evaluates them against all constraints in CON. This allows for in-depth comparison of the typological predictions made by different theories of GEN and CON at the syntax-prosody interface.

Studies in Articulatory Phonology (Browman & Goldstein, 1993) have established that what sounds like insertion of a segment can be a side effect of gestural timing relations. Based on acoustic evidence from a production experiment with six Turkish speakers, I argue that such gestural timing produces non-lexical vowels in complex onsets in Turkish-previously described as harmonizing epenthetic vowels (Clements & Sezer, 1982, inter alia). Non-lexical vowels occurred in 88.3% of tokens, and usually resembled [ɯ], failing to undergo vowel harmony. Non-lexical vowels are shorter than underlying vowels, and their F1 and F2 values are more affected by the following vowel, suggesting they are more subject to vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. These results support the hypothesis that the inserted acoustic vowels are targetless, created by timing relations between gestures, with the implication that Turkish phonology does not categorically ban complex onsets.

Match Theory (Selkirk 2011) and approaches to syntax-prosody mapping involving alignment and Wrap(XP) (Truckenbrodt 1995, 1999) insist that syntatic phrases at least partially map onto phonological phrases. Each approach specifies that certain XPs are visible for mapping, while others are not. Both Truckenbrodt (1999) and Selkirk (2011) suggest that when an XP hosts an adjunct, only the lower segment of that XP is visible at the interface. We undertake several case studies of these theories' predictions, drawing primarily on data from phrasing in the Bantu language Kinyambo (Bickmore 1990), in order to address the proper interpretation of syntactic adjunction structures at the syntax-phonology interface. To do so, we employ a new JavaScript application which we have developed, Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory (SPOT; Bellik, Bellik, & Kalivoda 2016) allowing us to automatically generate and evaluate prosodic tree structures of arbitrary length and depth. We conclude that high segments of XP in syntactic adjunction structures must be visible to Match (pace Selkirk 2011) in order to predict attested prosodic phrasings in Kinyambo, and that treatments of adjunction which ignore the highest segment of a maximal projection make surprising and possibly problematic predictions.

SPOT (Syntax Prosody in Optimality Theory app; http://spot.sites.ucsc.edu) automates candidate generation and evaluation for work on the syntax-prosody interface. SPOT is intended to facilitate the creation and comparison of multiple versions of an analysis, in service of refining constraint definitions and theory development. The codebase is available at https://github.com/syntax-prosody-ot. This paper briefly explains the motivation for the SPOT app, then walks through the process of creating an analysis in SPOT. We show how to create input syntactic trees, either manually or automatically; how to select a constraint set; and how to generate tableaux with candidates, constraints, and violation counts. Finally, we show how to use the output of SPOT to calculate rankings and typologies using an OT application.