Recursion of Phonological Phrase: Views from the Jordanian Arabic dialect of Irbid

Abstract

In the original model of Prosodic Hierarchy (Selkirk 1984, 1986; Nespor &Vogel 1986), the prosodic representation was partly autonomous from the syntactic structure, and prosodic recursion was not possible. Recently, it has been proposed in Match Theory (Selkirk 2011) that each prosodic unit has a corresponding syntactic constituent, and prosodic recursion exists, as proposed in some recent empirical studies (Féry and Truckenbrodt 2005; Wagner 2005, 2010, Selkirk 2009, 2011, Itô & Mester 2012, 2013; Elfner 2012among others). This paper empirically investigates the phonological phrase construction in Jordanian Arabic as spoken in Irbid. The empirical results indicate that phonological phrases match XPs and are marked by low phrase accents and pre-boundary lengthening. They also suggest that syntactic nesting motivates prosodic recursion: a nested XP matches a recursive phonological phrase which is cued by gradient pre-boundary lengthening. However, a recursive phonological phrase is limited to two subcategories, i.e. a minimal and maximal layer. In accord with that, prosodic recursion is neither prohibited as proposed in the early version of Strict Layer Hypothesis (Selkirk 1984, 1986; Nespor &Vogel 1986), nor freely allowed to perfectly mirror syntactic nesting as in Match Theory (Selkirk 2011).