The SPOT team is pleased to announce that we are working on a book for the Equinox series Advances in Optimality Theory, with the preliminary title Syntax Prosody in Optimality Theory: Theory and Analyses. The editors are Jennifer Bellik, Junko Ito, Nick Kalivoda, and Armin Mester, and in addition to chapters they write, the book will contain contributions from Richard Bibbs, Max Tarlov, and Nick Van Handel.

Syntax Prosody in Optimality Theory; Theory and Analyses; Bellik; Ito; Kalivoda; Mester

Abstract:

Optimality Theory has become the dominant approach to studying phonology, including analyses of the mapping from syntactic structure to prosodic structure. However, when both syntactic and prosodic structures are represented as trees, it is difficult, if not impossible, to systematically generate by hand all the possible candidates, i.e., all the possible prosodic parses that must be considered in an OT investigation for any given syntactic input. Consequently, most existing syntax-prosody analyses are in this way incomplete, compromising their very validity. This volume presents a series of studies of the syntax-prosody interface that are complete in this sense, thanks to their use of the SPOT application ( https://spot.sites.ucsc.edu ). This JavaScript application (developed by the editors) automates candidate generation and constraint evaluation, making a rigorous OT analysis of syntax-prosody possible. SPOT allows the user to test the typological predictions of the numerous proposed constraints on prosodic markedness and syntax-prosody mapping, so that researchers can make progress toward determining which formulations of the constraints should actually be part of the universal CON. A theme of the volume is comparing Match Theory (Selkirk 2011) with the older Align Theory of syntax-prosody mapping, with the finding that both are needed, at least in some languages.