Syntax-prosody interactions in the clausal domain: Head movement and Coalescence [Dissertation]
Brian Hsu
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003512
July 2016
This dissertation addresses two core questions in linguistic theory. [1] What are the sources of variation in word order, both within and across languages? [2] What information is shared between the syntactic and phonological modules of natural language grammar? It makes several proposals regarding possible mappings of syntactic structures to surface word order, and the role that phonological information plays in syntactic derivations. It argues that phonological considerations can influence word order by determining the optimal pronunciation of movement copies, and that some syntactic operations are driven by requirements to produce phonologically licit structures. The first few chapters examine the role of the Phonetic Form (PF) grammar in the linearization of movement copies and in the creation of prosodic structure. It presents an analysis of a puzzling pattern in Bangla (a.k.a. Bengali) that involves variation in the placement of the subordinating complementizer je. It is shown that previous analyses, which rely purely on grammatical or discourse properties, do not adequately account for the pattern. New data on Bangla prosody is presented to argue that variation in complementizer placement is driven by a grounded phonological constraint against the placement of je in the initial position of an Intonational Phrase. This leads to an implementation of the PF component as an Optimality-Theoretic grammar in which phonological and syntactic well-formedness conditions compete to determine the optimal pronunciation of movement copies. The remainder of the dissertation turns to the accessibility of phonological information to syntactic operations. It proposes the existence of a syntactic operation, Coalescence, which bundles structurally adjacent heads into a single, featurally complex head. This operation derives variation in how category features are realized on heads, as well as certain types of head-adjunction and cliticization. It is argued that the application of Coalescence is properly motivated and constrained by a requirement to eliminate heads that would be deficient in their phonological realization, suggesting that a restricted amount of information about phonological exponence is visible to syntactic operations. The approach is illustrated in analyses of cross-linguistic variation in the realization of positions within the clausal left periphery and the inflectional domain, with a focus on verb second effects and verb movement.