Caroline Féry

The last decades have seen a renewed interest in the algorithms relating syntactic and prosodic structure since the ban on recursivity that had been prevalent in phonology for a long time was relaxed; see for instance Selkirk (2011) and Elfner (2012) for the Match constraints and Ito and Mester (2009, 2013) for the recursivity of the prosodic structure

Theoretical accounts agree that German restrictive relative clauses (RCs) are integrated at the level of syntax as well as at the level of prosody (Brandt1990; Gärtner1998, 2002; Endriss and Gärtner2005; Catasso and Hinterhölzl2016; Sanfelici et al.2017) in both the default verb-final and the marked verb-second variant (referred to as iV2). Both variants are assumed to show the same prosodic pattern, i. e., prosodic integration into the main clause, and not unintegrated prosody, which would signal a sequence of two main clauses. To date strong empirical evidence for this close correspondence between prosody and syntax in RCs is missing. Findings regarding prosodic integration of verb-final RCs are not consistent, and research regarding the prosody of iV2 structures is very scarce. Using a delayed sentence-repetition task, our study investigated whether subordination is signaled by prosody in RCs in both the verb-final and the V2 variant in adults ( n = 21 n=21 ). In addition, we asked whether young language learners ( n = 23 n=23 ), who at the age of 3 have just started to produce embedded clauses, are already sensitive to this mapping. The adult responses showed significantly more patterns of prosodic integration than of prosodic non-integration in the V-final and the iV2 structures, with no difference between the two conditions. Notably, the child responses mirrored this adult behavior, showing significantly more patterns of prosodic integration than of prosodic non-integration in both V-final and iV2 structures. The findings regarding adults’ prosodic realizations provide novel empirical evidence for the claim that iV2 structures, just like verb-final RCs, show prosodic integration. Moreover, our study strongly suggests that subordination is signaled by prosody already by age 3 in both verb-final and V2 variants of RCs.

The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics - edited by Michael T. Putnam April 2020

This paper sheds light on the conditions for post-focal and post-verbal compression in French canonical sentences. We report on a production experiment, which results suggest that arguments and adjuncts are phrased differently, and that length and information structure only exert a significant influence on the realization of adjuncts. We formalize these results in terms of phrasing, arguing that French, as opposed to English for instance, does not allow compression at any prosodic level, but only in syntactically motivated prosodic phrases. We motivate the variation in our data via optional phrasing.

A striking property of Georgian intonation is that focused postverbal material is prosodically separated from the core clause. The challenge of the present study is to assess the external validity of this experimental result by means of a corpus study. Corpus data is known to contain immense variability due to uncontrolled factors related to spontaneous speech production, such as segmental effects, intra-speaker variation, etc. The corpus study confirmed that the right edge of the verb is frequently associated with a prosodic boundary that separates the prosodic constituent encompassing the verb and the preverbal material from the postverbal domain. This boundary can be overwritten by information structure, in particular by postfocal dephrasing.

Ladd (1988) investigates configurations A[BC]vs.[AB]C of three English clauses containing clause-internal downstep. A sister-node relation between clauses (but not a sequential relation) leads to downstep among clauses, such that C is systematically lower than B in A[BC] but not in [AB]C. These findings are replicated here with German data. In addition, the German phenomenon of upstep (Truckenbrodt 2007b) arguably targets the phonetic reference line that models lowering among clauses (van den Berget al.1992). We show that both Ladd's and our results also support Selkirk's (2011) suggestion that root sentences/illocutionary clauses can be interpreted as matched to intonational phrases (not just aligned with them, as in Downing 1970). The results also suggest that, in addition to downstep among intonational phrases, phrase-final lowering takes place.

Final compression in French is examined from a theoretical perspective and illustrated with experimental data. In French, only final prosodic domains that are at least the size of a prosodic phrase (Φ-phrase) may be subject to final compression. Prosodic units that are smaller than Φ-phrases, such as prosodic words (ω-words) or syllables, cannot be compressed. Therefore, final compression is a phrasal phenomenon. This conclusion is confirmed in a comparison between sequences consisting of a noun + adjective and verb + argument on one hand, and verb + adjunct on the other. Syntactic expressions of the first kind are integrated into single Φ-phrases, and final compression does not take place. Syntactic sequences of the verb + adjunct variety, however, form separate Φ-phrases, and final compression may occur.