Source: SPOT website

Lisa Selkirk gave an invited talk on Syntactic Constituency Spell-Out through Match Constraints at SPOT (Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory) at UC Santa Cruz this weekend. The workshop was organized by alums Junko Ito and Armin Mester (both 1986 UMass PhDs) and was part of their research project “aiming to create a computational platform that generates prosodic candidate sets from syntactic structure.” The workshop also included a talk on Incorporation, Focus, and the Phonology of Ellipsis in Irish, where Emily Elfner (2012 UMass PhD) was one of the co-authors. From the workshop description: “The syntax-prosody interface is the study of how syntactic (grammatical) structures are mapped onto the prosodic structures in different languages. Several strands of work in prosodic theory have recently converged on a number of common themes, from different directions, broadly couched in Optimality Theory. Selkirk (2011) has developed a vastly simplified approach to the syntax-prosody mapping which distinguishes only three levels (word, phrase, and clause), and syntactic constituents are systematically made to correspond to phonological domains (“Match Theory”). In an independent line of research, a long string of papers reaching back into the 1980s has convincingly demonstrated that recursive structures are by no means an exclusive property of syntax, but also play a crucial role in phonology. One of the hallmarks of Match Theory is the idea that the main force interfering with syntax-prosody isomorphism is not some kind of non-isomorphic mapping algorithm flattening out the structure, as first contemplated in SPE (Chomsky and Halle 1968, 372) and more fully worked out in later proposals, such as the edge-based theory built on one-sided alignment. It is rather the effect of genuine phonological wellformedness constraints on prosodic structure.”