Recursive phonological phrasing in Basque

Abstract

This paper presents data that force a revised account of the distribution of downstep and pitch reset in Lekeitio Basque. In the light of these data, previous analyses of pitch reset in Lekeitio Basque make wrong predictions. On the one hand, pitch reset is predicted where downstep occurs, and on the other, an ordinary reset is predicted where a large reset occurs. The occurrence of downstep and pitch reset, as well as the amount of pitch reset observed, is best accounted for under the assumption that languages possess a hierarchical prosodic structure that roughly matches the surface syntactic structure of a sentence, including levels of embedding or nesting of syntactic constituents. The analysis proposed in this paper is that pitch reset in Lekeitio Basque applies at the left edge of a non-minimal phonological phrase, i.e. a phonological phrase that dominates at least another phonological phrase.

Matching overtly headed syntactic phrases in Italian

“…Moreover, a recent line of work has argued for recursion at the level of ω, φ and ι (e.g. Ladd 1986, Wagner 2005, Ito & Mester 2009, Elfner 2015, Elordieta 2015, Bennett 2018. If these analyses are on the right track, and prosodic recursion is already necessary in the grammar, it is preferable to extend this approach to Italian, rather than stipulate a new category.…”

“…Selkirk & Lee (2017) propose MATCHPHRASELex, which ports the Lexical Category Condition into Match Theory by requiring MATCHXP to ignore functional XPs and XPs with silent heads. Another line of work has reached the opposite conclusion: Elfner (2012Elfner ( , 2015 provides evidence that all XPs, including functional phrases, are visible to MATCHXP, and other researchers have adopted this view (Elordieta 2015, Bennett et al 2016, Ito & Mester 2019. At the word level, Tyler (2019) argues that a strict lexical/functional distinction does not adequately account for the idiosyncratic behaviour of function words: some function words are prosodically dependent, while others form prosodic words.…”

“…Prosodic recursion has long been a subject of debate, however. Some researchers contend that recursive structures explain gradient phonetic phenomena and the application of domainspecific rules at the ω level (Booij 1996, Peperkamp 1997, Ito & Mester 2009, Bennett 2018), the φ level (Ito & Mester 2012, Elfner 2015, Elordieta 2015) and the ι level (Ladd 1986, Féry 2010, Myrberg 2013). However, many theories prohibit prosodic recursion.…”

(In)direct Reference in the Phonology-Syntax Interface under Phase Theory: A Response to “Modular PIC” (D’Alessandro and Scheer 2015)

“…Each accented word constitutes a prosodic domain. Unaccented words, however, must be grouped into a single prosodic domain, called accentual phrases in Elordieta (1997), and ϕ min in Elordieta (2015). The two examples in (21), adapted from Elordieta (1997), illustrate different prosodic groupings with two DPs that are segmentally homophonous (similar examples can be found in Selkirk 2011).…”

Recursion and the Definition of Universal Prosodic Categories

“…However, the question arises which syntactic structures qualify as recursive in current syntactic theory. Elordieta (2015), for instance, suggests: "Since one syntactic phrase may dominate another phrase, a natural assumption in this theory is that recursion is regular in prosodic structure as well. " (p. 58) This assumes that (a) phonology does not make a distinction between different XPs, as long as they are phrases, and (b) nothing other than phrase-hood is relevant to the syntax-phonology mapping.…”