Commentary on Elfner's Strong Start and phonological phrasing in Irish
Commentary on Emily Elfner's talk at Workshop “The Effects of Constituency on Sentence Phonology”, 07/29/16 - 07/31/16, UMass Amherst. See https://gsellblog.wordpress.com/program/
COMMENTARY ON ELFNER’S STRONG START AND PHONOLOGICAL PHRASING IN IRISH KRISTINE YU, UMASS AMHERST JULY 29, 2016 Workshop: the effects of constituency on sentence phonology
PHONOLOGICAL CONSTITUENCY TESTS? 6 Syntactic constituency tests do not depend on phonology. Phonological constituency tests should not depend on syntax.
While not all recordings provide equally clear F0 contours, it is assumed that the patterns discussed in this paper are in some sense the ``default'' pattern…there are many possible explanations for deviations from what is proposed to be the dominant pattern including, among other things, inter- and intra- speaker variation in phrasing patterns and disfluencies or unnaturalness due to laboratory context in which the recordings were produced. Elfner (2013, p. 1172-3) 10 ABSTRACTING AWAY FROM VARIABILITY AS A FIRST STEP
While not all recordings provide equally clear F0 contours, it is assumed that the patterns discussed in this paper are in some sense the ``default'' pattern…there are many possible explanations for deviations from what is proposed to be the dominant pattern including, among other things, inter- and intra- speaker variation in phrasing patterns and disfluencies or unnaturalness due to laboratory context in which the recordings were produced. Elfner (2013, p. 1172-3) 10 ABSTRACTING AWAY FROM VARIABILITY AS A FIRST STEP CARVING NATURE AT ITS JOINTS (Plato 360 B.C.E., Phaedrus 265E)
It happens that none of the papers contained in this issue suggest the existence of constituents of prosodic structure that fail to correspond to appropriate constituents of syntactic structure… further variation in the syntactic and phonological properties of the sentences investigated in these languages, or the conditions under which they are produced, [c]ould show the effects of prosodic markedness constraints or other factors which do lead to non-isomorphisms… Selkirk and Lee (2015, p. 5-6) 11 WHERE ARE THE SYNTAX-PROSODY MISMATCHES?
POTENTIALLY UNRECOGNIZED FACTORS ▸ Variability in prosodic structures is a consequence of variability in syntactic structures (Steedman 2000, Wagner 2005, Hirsch and Wagner 2015, Ahn 2015) ▸ Extraposition of object? [[VS]O] ▸ Different choices for spellout units (also, therefore no mismatch)? 17
POTENTIALLY UNRECOGNIZED FACTORS ▸ Variability in prosodic structures is a consequence of variability in syntactic structures (Steedman 2000, Wagner 2005, Hirsch and Wagner 2015, Ahn 2015) ▸ Extraposition of object? [[VS]O] ▸ Different choices for spellout units (also, therefore no mismatch)? ▸ Variability in prosodic structures is a consequence of variability in speaker’s imposed discourse contexts under “all-new” conditions (check for order effects?) 17
POTENTIALLY UNRECOGNIZED FACTORS ▸ Variability in prosodic structures is a consequence of variability in syntactic structures (Steedman 2000, Wagner 2005, Hirsch and Wagner 2015, Ahn 2015) ▸ Extraposition of object? [[VS]O] ▸ Different choices for spellout units (also, therefore no mismatch)? ▸ Variability in prosodic structures is a consequence of variability in speaker’s imposed discourse contexts under “all-new” conditions (check for order effects?) ▸ Relation between tonal events and boundaries and prominence 17