Category Archives: papers

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.

SPOT in Linguistic Vanguard

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A paper by Jenny Bellik and Nick Kalivoda introducing the SPOT application and explaining the necessity for computational tools in the domain of syntax prosody investigations situated in Optimality Theory has appeared in the journal Linguistics Vanguard:

https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2017-0051

Automated tableau generation using SPOT (Syntax Prosody in Optimality Theory)

Much recent work on the syntax-prosody interface has been based in Optimality Theory. The typical analysis explicitly considers only a small number of candidates that could reasonably be expected to be optimal under some ranking, often without an explicit definition of GEN. Manually generating all the possible candidates, however, is prohibitively time-consuming for most input structures – the Too Many Candidates Problem. Existing software for OT uses regular expressions for automated generation and evaluation of candidates. However, regular expressions are too low in the Chomsky Hierarchy of language types to represent trees of arbitrary size, which are needed for syntax-prosody work. This paper presents a new computational tool for research in this area: Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory (SPOT). For a given input, SPOT generates all prosodic parses under certain assumptions about GEN, and evaluates them against all constraints in CON. This allows for in-depth comparison of the typological predictions made by different theories of GEN and CON at the syntax-prosody interface.