Syntax–Semantics Interface
[chapter]
U. Sauerland, A. von Stechow
2001
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
prosodic constituent of type C P in the surface phonology. There have been other, relation-based, proposals concerning the nature of syntax-prosodic structure interface constraints as well, including Nespor and Vogel 1986, McHugh 1990, Kim 1997 understood to be consistent with the prosodic structure hypothesis, and with the input-output architecture. An input-output model of the syntax-phonology interface makes the essential claim that constraints on phonological output representation do not
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... eract with constraints on the surface syntactic representation. Two sorts of apparent challenges for the input-output model have recurred in recent literature. One sort concerns clitics whose distribution is governed by both syntactic and prosodic constraints, such as the second position clitics of Serbo-Croatian (Inkelas and Zec 1990). Yet because the syntax itself affords options in the positioning of second position clitics, it is not necessary to construe the prosodic subcategorization of a clitic as outranking a constraint on syntactic word order. Another sort of challenge concerns the alleged dependence of word order on the positioning of focus-related prosodic prominences in the sentence, as suggested by Vallduvi (1991) for Catalan, or Zubizarreta (1998) for Spanish. However, since the latter sort of phenomenon potentially can receive a purely syntactic treatment in which the Focus properties of syntactic representation are crucial in determining word order (see, e.g., Grimshaw and Samek-Lodovici 1998), this sort of case is not yet compelling. It remains to be seen whether the syntaxphonology interface is an input-output relation or whether it is instead a two-way street. See also Generative Grammar; Phonology; Syntax Bibliography Beckman M, Pierrehumbert J 1986 Intonational structure in English and Japanese. Phonology 3: 255-309 Dilley L, Shattuck-Hufnagel S 1996 Glottalization of wordinitial vowels as a function of prosodic structure. Journal of Phonetics 24: 424-44 Grimshaw J, Samek-Lodovici V 1998 Optimal subjects and subject universals. In: Barbosa P, Fox D, Hagstrom P, McGinnis M, Pesetsky D (eds.) Is the Best Good Enough? Anybody who speaks English knows that (1) is a sentence of English, and also has quite a precise idea about what (1) means. (1) Every boy is holding a block. English speakers know for infinitely many sentences that they are sentences of English, and they also know the meaning of these infinitely many sentences. A Syntax-Semantics Interface
doi:10.1016/b0-08-043076-7/02957-0
fatcat:j6oik4v2efhntbze5llj7pcbjq