The functional load hypothesis of Berinstein (1979) put forward the idea that languages which use a suprasegmental property (duration, F0) contrastively will not use it to realise stress. The functional load hypothesis is often cited when stress correlates are discussed, both when it is observed that the language under discussion follows the hypothesis and when it fails to follow it. In the absence of a more wide-ranging assessment of how frequently languages do or do not conform to the functional load hypothesis, it is unknown whether it is an absolute, a strong tendency, a weak tendency or unsupported. The results from a database of reported stress correlates and use of contrastive duration for 140 languages are presented and discussed. No support for the functional load hypothesis is found.

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.

This paper introduces Match Theory, an Optimality-Theoretic approach to the syntax-phonology interface proposed by Selkirk (2011). The theory states that a family of Match constraints favor syntax-prosody isomorphism, but that these can be outranked by constraints on prosodic wellformedness and/or information structure, resulting in certain principled mismatches. We compare Match Theory to previous OT approaches involving edge-alignment, and discuss several outstanding issues for Match Theory such as the proper treatment of asymmetries in syntax-prosody matching.

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.

Latin verbs appear to both obey and disobey the Mirror Generalization (Baker 1985), albeit in different inflectional forms (Cinque 1999). Given the importance of the Mirror Generalization to morphosyntactic theorizing, this situation deserves scrutiny. We develop an analysis on which all Latin finite verbs, whether mirroring or anti-mirroring, share a single, simple, virtually invariant derivation, involving one step of head movement (Asp to T) and one step of phrasal movement (vP to [Spec,TP]). On this analysis, the Mirror Generalization is valid for Latin, despite appearances, but it is crucially about structures formed by operations on heads: phrasal movement can give rise to apparent violations of it (Myler 2017). The analysis extends readily to nonfinite forms, solving an anti-mirroring paradox arising among the participles. It also makes correct syntactic predictions. When the verb word is a constituent, it is a TP, and the analysis correctly predicts that it should move as a phrase, not as a head. The analysis also makes correct predictions about the positions of vP-adjuncts, and is fully compatible with what is known about leftward argument movement out of vP. Finally, unlike two competing analyses (Embick 2000; Calabrese 2019), it accounts for anti-mirroring in Latin without any stipulations placing passive Voice in an unexpectedly peripheral position within the verb word. The larger picture that emerges is one in which phonological words need not correspond to syntactic constituents, but can instead be reflexes of linearly contiguous series of morphemes suspended across potentially vast regions of syntactic space (Julien 2002).