On the Relation between Syntactic Phrases and Phonological Phrases

Abstract

This article argues that the relation between syntactic XPs and phonological phrases is subject to a constraint, WRAP-XP, that demands that each XP be contained in a phonological phrase. WRAP-XP is argued to interact with the constraints on edge alignment proposed by Selkirk (1986, 1995), with a constraint against recursive structure, and with a constraint aligning an edge of a focus with a phonological phrase. WRAP-XP is intended to replace, and improve on, an earlier proposal by Hale and Selkirk (1987) to the effect that lexical government plays a role in the syntax-prosody mapping. The languages discussed in more detail are Tohono O'odham, Kimatuumbi, and Chicheŵa.

Morphological alternations at the intonational phrase edge

“…The accompanying principles are that the phonological string is completely parsed into prosodic structure (EXHAUSTIVITY), and each prosodic constituent i is immediately dominated by a prosodic constituent of type i+1 (STRICT LAYERING). While recent work has challanged these ideas, arguing that there are recursive prosodic structures (Truckenbrodt 1999;Wagner 2005;Ito and Mester 2006), there is no evidence that K'ichee' has recursive prosody at the levels of the hierarchy I consider here. Therefore, I will assume that the constraints enforcing STRICT LAYERING are ranked high in K'ichee'.…”

The relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure in language production

“…She proposes that in English, phonological phrases should align with the right edge of XPs that are headed by lexical elements. The second proposal is Truckenbrodt's (1999) Wrap constraint. Roughly speaking, Wrap favours prosodic phrasings that do not break up syntactic constituents over those that do.…”

“…However, it should be noted that there is a great deal of controversy surrounding how exactly phonological phrases should be syntactically defined. For example, Selkirk (1986), Ferreira (1988, Truckenbrodt (1999), and others define the term differently. For the purposes of measuring size, how phonological phrases are defined is not crucial to our argument since, as discussed above, most units of size would most likely do just as well.…”

“…The syntactic structure of a sentence also probably plays a role in boundary placement (Selkirk, 1984(Selkirk, , 1986Nespor & Vogel, 1986;Truckenbrodt, 1999). In this paper we focus on the relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure in sentence production.…”

Adjunction and Branchingness Effects in Syntax-Prosody Mapping

“…For example, Match Theory (MT), an approach to the mapping from syntactic to prosodic structure couched within Optimality Theory (Selkirk 2011, Elfner 2012, Myrberg 2013, predicts that prosodic structure should closely resemble syntactic structure, and that deviations from perfect syntaxprosody isomorphism should only arise due to markedness constraints. Similarly, Align/Wrap Theory (Truckenbrodt 1995(Truckenbrodt , 1999, an OT implementation of Selkirk's (1986) End-Based Approach, employs alignment constraints which demand that the left and right edges of syntactic XPs map to corresponding left and right edges of phonological phrases, as well as a constraint WRAP-XP, which requires every XP to be enclosed in a corresponding phonological phrase in the prosodic parse.…”