The Appositive Group

Abstract

Abstract Before embarking on an analysis of the appositive group, which is the prosodic domain ranked one step above the word, it will be appropriate to consider the theoretical status of the prosodic domain in general and the sort of evidence that can be adduced from speech and from verse in support of particular domains. The rules of connected speech surveyed in Chapter 6-gliding, elision, contraction, resyllabification, refoot ing, and remapping-apply within domains which, in the present state of knowledge, can usually be stated most easily morphologically or syntac tically. However, even in terms of a purely formal and logical analysis, this approach is open to the criticism that it omits an explanatory link. The concept of the domain, in common with all phonological constructs not concerned with ordinal and quantitative relations, arises from the related fundamental organizational principles of classification and abstrac tion. A domain is a set of syntactic structures within which apply a set of phonological rules; by virtue of the existence of the domain, the syntac tic structures and the phonological rules become cooccurrence classes. Unless the classification is accidental, the members of each class can be assumed to share some internal property. In concrete terms, if in a language syntactic phrases are characterized by a conjunction of phrase accent, final lengthening, resyllabification and elision, either this partic ular combination of phonological properties is quite accidental or it represents the various manifestations of a single shared property, and that shared property must obviously be phonological and not syntactic, since the class of items sharing it is phonological. This interpretation, based on formal analysis, is supported by substantive considerations. In general, the rules of phrase prosody serve to improve the fluency of speech within prosodically demarcated domains.