Monthly Archives: June 2021

Kalivoda & Bellik in AMP 2020 proceedings

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A paper by Nick Kalivoda and Jennifer Bellik titled “Overtly Headed XPs and Irish Syntax-Prosody Mapping” recently appeared in the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting on Phonology 2020, published by the Linguistic Society of America.

Abstract:

Analyses of Irish phonological phrasing (Elfner 2012 et seq.) have been influential in shaping Match Theory (Selkirk 2011), an OT approach to mapping syntactic to prosodic structure. We solve two constraint ranking paradoxes concerning the relative ranking of Match and StrongStart. Irish data indicate that while XPs with silent heads can fail to map to phonological phrases in certain circumstances, overtly headed XPs cannot. They also indicate that rebracketing due to the constraint StrongStart occurs only sentence-initially, contrary to predictions. We account for these puzzles by invoking Van Handel’s (2019) Match constraint which sees only XPs with overt heads, and by positing a new version of StrongStart which only applies to material at the left edge of the intonational phrase. Our analysis is developed using the Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory application (SPOT) and OTWorkplace.

Read the full paper online here.

Binarity talk at Keio x ICU colloquium series

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On May 10, Jenny Bellik gave a talk on Binarity constraints in the Keio x ICU colloquium series, titled “Size effects in prosody: Counting branches, counting leaves.”

Abstract: Binarity—the pressure for phonological constituents to contain exactly two elements—is widely recognized as a factor that shapes prosody. This talk investigates two contrasting conceptions of phrasal binarity, and their divergent consequences. Branch-counting binarity is a structural constraint that counts a phonological phrase’s branches. Branch-counting binarity prioritizes matching larger, branching XPs, and works in tandem with Match(XP) to produce recursive prosodic structure. In contrast, leaf-counting binarity is a length constraint that counts the words that a phonological phrase contains. Word-counting binarity prefers not to match larger XPs, and conflicts with Match(XP). It predicts a more complex typology than branch-counting binarity. Both branch-counting and leaf-counting binarity constraints are needed to account for the range of observed size effects cross-linguistically, as seen in examples from phrasing in Irish (Elfner 2012) and Italian (Van Handel to appear).

The talk was recorded and can be viewed on Youtube or below.