Prosody and recursion

This thesis proposes a recursive mapping of syntactic derivations to prosodic representations. I argue that the prosody of an expression, just like its meaning, is determined compositionally, as originally proposed in Chomsky et al. (1957), Chomsky and Halle (1968). Syntactic structure are cyclically spelled out and assigned a semantic and phonological interpretation. The cyclic approach is motivated based on data from the prosody of coordinate structures, integrating insights from syntax, combinatorics, and semantics. The algorithm distinguishes two ways of prosodically relating the output of cyclic domains: they can either be mapped to prosodic domains that are on a par and match in prosodic status: PROSODIC MATCHING; or the output of one cycle can be prosodically subordinated to another cycle: PROSODIC SUBORDINATION. Together, they derive a metrical structure that encodes information about phrasing, accent placement, and prominence. Scope relations, argument structure, and information structure affect prosodic phrasing indirectly by determining which of the two principles applies and when a syntactic cycle is spelled out. The derived metrical representation is a relational grid (Liberman, 1975).

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Wagner, Michael, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Alex Marantz and Donca Steriade.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33713

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33713