Syntax Phonology Interface

The Handbook of Phonological Theory, second edition offers an innovative and detailed examination of recent developments in phonology, and the implications of these within linguistic theory and related disciplines. Revised from the ground-up for the second edition, the book is comprised almost entirely of newly-written and previously unpublished chapters Addresses the important questions in the field including learnability, phonological interfaces, tone, and variation, and assesses the findings and accomplishments in these domains Brings together a renowned and international contributor team Offers new and unique reflections on the advances in phonological theory since publication of the first edition in 1995 Along with the first edition, still in publication, it forms the most complete and current overview of the subject in print

This book centers on theoretical issues of phonology-syntax interface based on tone sandhi in Chinese dialects. It uses patterns in tone sandhi to study how speech should be divided into domains of various sizes or levels. Tone sandhi refers to tonal changes that occur to a sequence of adjacent syllables or words. The size of this sequence (or the domain) is determined by various factors, in particular the syntactic structure of the words and the original tones of the words. Chinese dialects offer a rich body of data on tone sandhi, and hence great evidence for examining the phonology-syntax interface, and for examining the resulting levels of domains (the prosodic hierarchy). Syntax-Phonology Interface: Argumentation from Tone Sandhi in Chinese Dialects is an extremely valuable text for graduate students and scholars in the fields of linguistics and Chinese.

This book investigates the nature of the relationship between phonology and syntax and proposes a theory of Minimal Indirect Reference that solves many classic problems relating to the topic.

"Though centered on Italian, cross-linguistic analysis is extensively provided: data from languages as diverse as English, Hungarian, Modern Greek, Hausa, Chichewa, Serbo-Croatian and Somali are used to show that despite surface variations, the interface interpretation of Focus and Topic lies in the interaction between base-generated extraposition and feature-checking." "This book targets scholars and researchers in linguistics who are interested in syntactic and/or phonological analysis of discourse-related categories within the Minimalist approach."--BOOK JACKET.

"...this work represents a key case study in the study of the prosody and syntax interactions." (Pilar Prieto, Lingua 115, 2005)

A fundamentally new approach to the theory of phonology and its relation to syntax is developed in this book, which is the first to address the question of the relation between syntax and phonology in a systematic way.This general theory differs from its predecessors in the generative tradition in several respects. By arguing that the intonational structure of a sentence determines certain aspects of its stress pattern or rhythmic structure, and not vice versa, it provides a novel view of the intonation-stress relation. It also offers a new theory of the focus-prosody relation that solves a variety of classic puzzles and involves an appeal to the place of a focused constituent in the predicate-argument structure of the sentence. The book also includes other novel features, among them a development of the metrical grid theory of stress (including a complete treatment of English word stress in this framework), the representation of juncture in terms of "silent" positions in the metrical grid (with a treatment of sandhi in terms of this rhythmic juncture), and a "rhythmic" nonsyntactic approach to the basic phonology of function words in EnglishElisabeth 0. Selkirk is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This book is tenth in the series, Current Studies in Linguistics.

Displacement is a fundamental property of grammar. Typically, when an occurrence moves it is pronounced in only one environment. This was previously viewed as a primitive/irreducible property of grammar. Recent work, however, suggests that it follows from principled interactions between the syntactic and phonological components of grammar. As such, the phonetic character of movement chains can be seen as both a reflection of and probe into the syntax-phonology interface. This volume deals with repetition, an atypical outcome of movement operations in which displaced elements are pronounced multiple times. Although cross-linguistically rare, the phenomenon obtains robustly in Nupe, a Benue-Congo language of Nigeria. Repetition raises a tension of the descriptive-explanatory variety. In order to achieve both measures of adequacy, movement theory must be supplemented with an account of the conditions that drive and constrain multiple pronunciation. This book catalogs these conditions, bringing to light a number of undocumented aspects of Nupe grammar.

This book investigates the nature of the relationship between phonology and syntax and proposes a theory of Minimal Indirect Reference that solves many classic problems relating to the topic.