Abstract
AbstractA persistent issue for the Prosodic Hierarchy is what repertory of prosodic constituents is needed to define the commonly recurring domains for phonological processes. Even though there is a long tradition of work arguing in favor of up to three subphrasal constituents (Composite Group (CG), PWord and PStem), a body of recent work has argued in favor of a more parsimonious view of the repertory,making the strong claim that, at the subphrasal level, the Prosodic Hierarchy contains only one constituent, Phonological Word (PWord). Any additional subphrasal domains required by the phonology must be defined as recursions of PWord. This paper argues that PStem must find a place even in a parsimonious Prosodic Hierarchy. It cannot easily be replaced by recursive PWord or by a CG-PWord distinction. The cross-linguistic validity of a PStem-PWord distinction is supported by showing that it accounts for a robust cross-linguistic generalization concerning subphrasal phonological domains. Alternatives to PStem not only miss this generalization but also prove to be formally inadequate.
Highlights
Even though there is a long tradition of work arguing in favor of up to three subphrasal constituents (Composite Group (CG), PWord and Phonological Stem (PStem)), a body of recent work has argued in favor of a more parsimonious view of the repertory, making the strong claim that, at the subphrasal level, the Prosodic Hierarchy contains only one constituent, Phonological Word (PWord)
We propose that the most straightforward way to account for these contrasts in the phonological behavior of clitics and inflectional prefixes is to appeal to a distinction between PWord, which parses prefixes into a constituent external to PStem, and CG, which parses clitics into a constituent external to PWord: (21) (CG clitics (PWORD Prefixes (PSTEM Root+Suffixes)) clitics)
Bickel et al (2009), Hildebrandt (2007), and Schiering et al (2010) analyze the phonology of Limbu as their parade example in arguing that the traditional Prosodic Hierarchy does not provide sufficient subphrasal prosodic constituents to account for all the phonological domains that are cross-linguistically well-attested in what they define as a prefixstem-suffix=clitic string. (See this work for detailed motivation of the suffix-clitic distinction in Limbu.) we show that the proposed expanded Prosodic Hierarchy in (10) neatly accounts for the domains motivated for Limbu by general phonological processes of the language
Summary
As developed in Nespor and Vogel (1986), and Selkirk (1986) and much subsequent work, proposes that the domains for phonological processes are defined by parsing phonological strings into a set of hierarchicallyarranged prosodic constituents – the Prosodic Hierarchy. Generally agreed upon. Recent work by Selkirk (2009, 2011) and Ito and Mester (2009a, 2019b, 2012, 2013) has argued in favor of a more parsimonious view They make the strong claim that the Prosodic Hierarchy contains only one subphrasal morphosyntacticallydefined constituent, PWord, which by default matches a syntactic word (Selkirk 2011: 439). Analyses that aim to replace PStem with some other prosodic constituent will be shown to be unsatisfactory, as they fail to capture a robust cross-linguistic generalization regarding a stem-word asymmetry in prosodic domains in a formally coherent way.
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