The Role of Prosody and Morphology in the Mapping of Information Structure onto Syntax

Abstract

The mapping of information structure onto morphology or intonation varies greatly crosslinguistically. Agglutinative languages, like Inuktitut or Quechua, have a rich morphological layer onto which discourse-level features are mapped but a limited use of intonation. Instead, English or Spanish lack grammaticalized morphemes that convey discourse-level information but use intonation to a relatively large extent. We propose that the difference found in these two pairs of languages follows from a division of labor across language modules, such that two extreme values of the continuum of possible interactions across modules are available as well as combinations of morphological and intonational markers. At one extreme, in languages such as Inuktitut and Quechua, a rich set of morphemes with scope over constituents convey sentence-level and discourse-level distinctions, making the alignment of intonational patterns and information structure apparently redundant. At the other extreme, as in English and to some extent Spanish, a series of consistent alignments of PF and syntactic structure are required to distinguish sentence types and to determine the information value of a constituent. This results in a complementary distribution of morphology and intonation in these languages. In contact situations, overlap between patterns of module interaction are attested. Evidence from Quechua–Spanish and Inuktitut–English bilinguals supports a bidirectionality of crosslinguistic influence; intonational patterns emerge in non-intonational languages to distinguish sentence types, whereas morphemes or discourse particles emerge in intonational languages to mark discourse-level features.

Human self-domestication and the evolution of prosody

“…This is confirmed by cases of language contact: to distinguish between e.g. sentence types, specific intonational patterns appear in the non-intonational language, whereas morphosyntactic cues emerge in the intonational language (Colantoni & Sánchez, 2021).…”

Human self‐domestication and the evolution of prosody

“…In truth, one should expect a feed‐back loop effect between these two aspects of language, with prosody contributing to the emergence of syntactic complexity, as noted, but with syntactic complexity favouring the advent of complex phrasal prosody. This is confirmed by instances of language contact between non‐intonational (or tonal) languages (like Mandarin) and intonational languages (like English): in order to distinguish between sentence types, a distinctive intonational pattern can appear in the non‐intonational language, whereas some morphosyntactic cues can emerge in the intonational language (see Colantoni & Sánchez, 2021for details).…”

Perception and Production of Sentence Types by Inuktitut-English Bilinguals

“…Overall, these studies show that Quechua-Spanish bilinguals use different peak alignment patterns and have a restricted use of pitch in Spanish when compared to monolingual controls. If, as Colantoni and Sánchez (2021) suggest, this is a result of different patterns of module interactions across languages according to which languages that have a rich morphological layer tend to have a restricted use of pitch to mark sentence types or information structure, we should expect to see a more restricted use of intonation in the English spoken by L1 Inuktitut speakers.…”