Angelika Kratzer & Elisabeth Selkirk. 2007. “Phase theory and prosodic spellout: the case of verbs”. ms, to appear in The Linguistic Review.
In this paper we explore the consequences of adopting recent proposals by Chomsky 2000, 2001, 2005a, 2005b, according to which the syntactic derivation proceeds in terms of phases. The notion of phase–through the associated notion of spellout–allows for an insightful theory of the fact that syntactic constituents receive default phrase stress not across the board, but as a function of yet-to-be-explicated conditions on their syntactic context. We will see that the phonological evidence requires us to modify somewhat the theory of which functional categories actually define a phase. Patterns of default, syntax-determined, phrase stress are argued to result from a prosodic spellout requiring the highest phrase in the spellout domain to correspond to a major prosodic phrase in phonological representation, and carry major phrase stress. Our proposal is part of a growing family of proposals (Legate 2003, Kahnemuyipour 2004, Selkirk and Kratzer 2005, Wagner 2005, Adger 2006, Ishihara 2006, Truckenbrodt 2006) which seek to explain core aspects of sentence prosody in terms of phase theory.
[…] This post on Kai von Fintel’s Semantics etc. blog reminds me that there’s a little-publicized archive of UMass linguistics papers, searchable and browsable by subject area. Here’s the phonology area, and here’s the phonetics area; there are quite a few other areas, almost all of them populated by several papers. […]
January 26th, 2007, at 4:17 pm #