Prosody and Prosodic Interfaces

This volume brings together new work on prosody and prosodic interfaces from international experts in the field. The book is divided into three parts that explore topics in word prosody and phrase prosody, lexical tone and intonation, and the syntax-prosody interface. While many recent studies have focused on prosody and related questions, a significant number of languages, dialects, and varieties remain largely undocumented or understudied in this respect. The chapters in this volume help to fill this empirical gap, with investigations into languages such as Choguita Rarámuri (Mexico), Poko (Papua New Guinea), Rere (Sudan), and Uspanteko (Guatemala), alongside more widely studied languages such as Japanese and Serbian. The authors also address a range of important questions pertaining to, for example, the interactions between lexical and postlexical tones and the relationship between prosodic and syntactic structure. The volume as a whole sheds light on how prosody is structured in language and how it functions in human communication.

1 - Word tone is epiphenomenal: A case study from Poko
2 - Accent shift and the reconstruction of Old Common Basque accentuation
3 - Tone and stress as agents of cross-dialectal variation: The case of Serbian
4 - Two-peakedness in South Swedish and the Scandinavian tone accent typology
5 - Prosodic asymmetries in nominal vs verbal phrases in Bantu
6 - How metrical is the Autosegmental-Metrical model? Evidence from pitch accents in Nubi, Persian, and English
7 - Tonal variability and marginal contrast: Lexical pitch in Uspanteko
8 - Stress, tone, and intonation in Choguita Rarámuri
9 - Interactions between lexical and postlexical tones: Evidence from Japanese vocative prosody
10 - Prosodic phrasing, long-distance rise, and structural prominence marking in Japanese dialects without lexically constrastive tones
11 - Prosody of declaratives and questions in Rere (Koalib)
12 - Xitsonga tone: The syntax-phonology interface
13 - Unaccentedness and the formation of prosodic structure in Lekeitio Basque
14 - On the (lack of) correspondence between syntactic clauses and intonational phrases
15 - Matching and alignment

Haruo Kubozono is Director of the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. His research interests range from speech disfluencies to speech prosody (accent and intonation) and its interfaces with syntax and information structure. He is the editor of The Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology (De Gruyter, 2015), The Phonetics and Phonology of Geminate Consonants (OUP, 2017), and Tonal Change and Neutralization (De Gruyter, 2018). Junko Ito is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research in phonology focuses on the morphophonemics and prosody of Japanese as it pertains to word structure and its phonological form. More recently, she has been working on issues surrounding the syntax-phonology interface, and on the structure of the phonological lexicon and its implications for the theory of grammar. Armin Mester is Research Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research is concerned with the principles organizing the prosodic structures found in language, as manifested in systems of syllabification, stress, and accent, and the mapping of syntactic and morphological structures onto prosodic form. He is pursuing this work in the context of Optimality Theory, with an additional interest in the basic architecture of the theory.