Syntactic and eurhythmic constraints on phrasing decisions in Catalan*

Abstract

Abstract. This article investigates the role of syntactic and prosodic markedness constraints on the construction of phonological phrases (φ‐ or p‐phrases) in Catalan. It is shown that the construction of prosodic structure in this language cannot solely rely on syntactic information but rather also has to refer to prosodic markedness constraints which regulate the size and eurhythmicity of phrase constituents. Specifically, phonological phrasing in Catalan is determined, among other things, by the interaction of right‐alignment of syntactic and phonological phrases (Align‐XP,R; Selkirk 1986) and the requirement that each XP is contained in a p‐phrase (Wrap‐XP; Truckenbrodt 1995) together with the following set of prosodic factors: 1) a maximal requirement on the length of p‐phrases at the end of utterances, Max‐Bin‐End, which requires that each p‐phrase containing a nuclear stress should contain at most two prosodic words; 2) a minimality constraint on the prosodic parsing of utterances, Min‐Utt, which requires that each utterance contains a minimally binary p‐phrase; 3) a eurhythmic condition, No‐Clash, which does not allow the presence of two immediately adjacent stressed syllables, partly affects phrasing decisions in this language. Size and eurhythmic effects of this type are also active, though in a weaker fashion, in other Romance languages such as Italian (Ghini 1993a, 1993b), in Brazilian Portuguese (Sandalo & Truckenbrodt 2002), and in European Portuguese and Spanish (Elordieta et al. 2003, Prieto (forthcoming)).