Prosody of Case Markers in Urdu

Abstract

This paper studies the prosody of case clitics in Urdu, for which various different claims exist in the literature. We conducted a production experiment and controlled for effects potentially arising from the phonetics of the case clitics, the syntactic function they express and clausal position. We find that case clitics are incorporated into the prosodic phrase of the noun and that they become part of the overall LH contour found on accentual phrases in Urdu/Hindi. We also find some differences across case type and position which we tie to information structural effects.