Asymmetries in prosodic domain formation
Michael Wagner
February 2005 

This paper presents an asymmetry in the prosody of Dutch, English, and German: if a functor precedes its complement, it is phrased separately; if it follows its complement or part of it, the two are phrased together and the functor is prosodically subordinated and ‘affixed’ to the preceding prosodic constituent. The prosodic asymmetry is first shown for the relation between predicates and their complements, and is then generalized to modification. A recursive algorithm is presented that derives the correct prosodic structure and nuclear stress in the three languages, exploiting only the syntactic asymmetry of projection and the left-right asymmetry of linear order.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/000429 (please use that when you cite this article, unless you want to cite the full url: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000429)
Published in:	MIT Working Papers
keywords:	prosody, nuclear stress, linear order, modification, focus, phonology, syntax, semantics
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