Delimitation of Syntactic Units

Abstract

In the present state of our techniques we may assume that we know how to isolate morphemes properly-that is, unequivocally and without unaccountable residue. It is not so certain that we know how to isolate words, and hence how to separate morphology from syntax. Given a viable definition of the word for some particular language, we come finally to the problem of assigning words properly to relevant syntactic units such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. To illustrate one possible technique of discovering the syntactic framework of a language, I shall analyze a short text of Ponapean, a Micronesian language of the Eastern Caroline Islands.1 The text is an excerpt from a spontaneous conversation recorded on tape and later transcribed. Roman numerals mark four UTTERANCE UNITS-stretches of speech activity by a single speaker preceded and followed by silence.2 Each utterance unit consists of one or more CONTOURS (marked by slant lines), defined as a phoneme sequence between two audible pauses or between pause and silence, such that all morphophonemic processes take place within the contour and only within this. Every contour has one primary stress and a pitch sequence; it may also have secondary stresses. (There are differences among Ponapean contours which affect the classification of these segments but not the segmentation itself. They will be disregarded in this paper.) In the text, numbers in parentheses identify the individual WORDS (but hesitation noises are not numbered). The word is defined, for Ponapean, as a sequence of morphemes and morpheme clusters in fixed order. Sequences with variable order consist of separate one-morpheme words. The following phoneme symbols appear in the text: SHORT VOWELS a o e i, D;