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.