Verb Height Indeed Determines Prosodic Phrasing: Evidence from Iron Ossetic

Lena Borise, David Erschler

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

We provide novel evidence in favor of the proposal by Hamlaoui and Szendrői (2015, 2017), who argue for a flexible mapping between an Intonational Phrase (ɩ) and syntactic constituents. According to them, ɩ corresponds to the highest projection that hosts verbal material, together with its specifier. The prediction is that the size of ɩ co-varies with the height of the verb, if the latter is variable. Our evidence comes from Iron Ossetic (East Iranian), a language with multiple projections available for verb raising, depending on context. The flexible ɩ-mapping approach – but not more rigid approaches to ɩ-formation – can account for the properties of ɩ-formation in Iron Ossetic. This applies to the prosody of utterances that contain negative indefinites, narrow foci, and single wh-phrases. More complex wh-questions (those with multiple wh-phrases and/or negative indefinites) provide evidence that syntax-based flexible ɩ-mapping approach interacts with language-specific eurhythmic constraints. The Iron Ossetic facts, therefore, provide support for the flexible ɩ-mapping approach, which has not been tested until now on languages of this type.
Original languageEnglish
Pages1-28
Number of pages29
DOIs
StatePublished - 6 Nov 2020

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