French prepositions:no peeking

Spatial location and direction are expressed in French primarily by means of prepositional phrases involving three different prepositions:en, dans and à. Disregarding the usual collection of fixed expressions, lexical idiosyncrasies and subtle pragmatic and stylistic effects, the large generalisation about spatial PPs is that dans and a tend to be used with objects understood referentially, as in (1) and (2) (such ‘determinate’ or ‘particularised’ NPs will typically have a determiner in them), while en is used with non-referential objects, as in (3) (these will typically lack a determiner):(1) a. dans la prison ‘in(to) the prison’b. dans une prison ‘in(to) a prison’(2) a l'ecole ‘in(to) the school’(3) en prison ‘in(to) prison’

Government and tonal phrasing in Papago

The intonation contour of a Papago sentence is entirely predictable on the basis of its surface syntactic structure. It consists of a sequence of instances of the pattern (L)HL. For example, one Papago sentence may manifest a single (L)HL pattern, as in (I):while another will show repetitions of the canonical tonal shape, as in (2):Our task in this paper will be to characterise the distribution of the (L)HL pattern in Papago sentences. Our analysis is that the phonological representation of a sentence of Papago consists of a sequence of one or more tonal phrases, and that (L)HL is the pattern assigned to a tonal phrase. This tonal phrasing - i.e. the beginnings and ends of individual tonal phrases - will be indicated by parentheses in the tonal tier, as in (1) and (2). The association of the (L)HL pattern within each tonal phrase is captured by simple rules of the phonology, to be described in §2. Thus the description of the syntax of Papago intonation contours will centre on the tonal phrasing itself, and on the manner in which it is determined with respect to surface syntactic structure.

Vowel degemination and fast speech rules

In the last two years, two very interesting books about the interaction of phonology and syntax, Selkirk (1984a) and Kaisse (1985), have addressed the problem of characterising fast speech processes and made interesting proposals about the status of fast speech rules (FSRs) and their place in the grammar. Essentially, Kaisse's proposal is that fast speech rules belong to a separate subcomponent of the phonology, which is ordered after the sandhi rules subcomponent: while sandhi rules are sensitive to their syntactic environment, fast speech rules have only phonetic motivation. That is, they operate throughout a string, within as well as across words, independently of its structure (cf. also Rotenberg 1978; Hasegawa 1979).

Hungarian cola

Stowell (1979) argues that an intermediate level of structure between foot and word tree is necessary: superfeet or cola. Cola are metrical constituents built on the output of footing. Stowell's argument is based on the accentual systems of Passamaquoddy and Seneca. However, in both cases, the analysis is for one reason or another questionable. First, P. LeSourd (personal communication) has suggested that the Passamaquoddy data are more complex than the sample Stowell presents, which undercuts his account. (Stowell's data are drawn from LeSourd's fieldwork.) Second, the Seneca analysis rests on the assumption that bounded and unbounded feet cannot cooccur in the same language – not a necessary component of metrical theory.

On defining the intonational phrase: evidence from Slave

Syntactic juncture has been a topic of interest in phonological theory in recent years. One major issue addressed in the study of syntactic juncture is how to predict from syntactic structure the domains of phrase-level rules of the phonology, or prosodic structure. Many, including Selkirk (1978, 1984, 1986), Nespor & Vogel (1982) and Hayes (1984), propose that utterances are organised in a prosodic hierarchy, determined by but not isomorphic to syntactic structure. In work by these authors, algorithms for determining the relationship between syntactic structure and prosodic structure have been proposed, leading to a deeper understanding of prosodic phrasing.