Prosodic syntax and morphology in Chinese

Viac o knihe

In linguistics, it has been commonly assumed that syntax can exert influence on prosody, but the opposite direction, prosody influences syntax, is much less widely recognized. The present manuscript argues for a bidirectional interaction between prosody and Syntax governs prosody and prosody also constrains syntax, based on data from Chinese. For example, a classical problem in Chinese syntax is only one constituent is, in general, allowed after the main verb. However, if the object is a destressed element (a pronoun, for example), two constituents can legitimately occur after the verb. This pattern is explained by proposing a prosodic feature assignment on elementary trees in the Tree Adjoining Grammar notation. The manuscript is the first work that a system of prosodically constrained syntax is proposed in the literature, and it will create a sub-field of linguistics in the study of human languages.