Hierarchical prosodic structures in the intonation of center-embedded relative clauses

Abstract

There is no doubt that recursion exists in syntax, but whether this is reflected in prosody is still an open question. In this paper, the prosody of sentences with syntactically recursive center-embedded clauses is examined empirically in two languages. On the basis of the results, we argue for recursion of higher prosodic domains in German. Evidence for this proposal comes from the F0 range of the matrix clause, which is larger if embedded material is present. It is both higher in the high regions and lower in the low regions than in matrix clauses without embedded material. A second piece of evidence relates to pitch scaling of high tones at the boundaries between clauses, which is sensitive to syntactic embedding. In Hindi, by contrast, no evidence for embedding of prosodic phrases could be found. Prosodic phrases are concatenated and are in a downstep relationship to each other, regardless of the syntactic structure of the sentence. The difference between the prosodic structure of German and Hindi is tentatively explained by their different intonational properties: German is an intonation language with lexical stress and Hindi is a phrase language without lexical stress, in which tonal structures are phrase-based.