The syntax-prosody competition: Evidence from adjunct prosodic parsing in iGeneration Taiwanese

Abstract

The syntax-phonology interface has been widely discussed. This paper probes into the connection between adjunct tone sandhi and phonological phrasing in iGeneration Taiwanese (iGT); the iGeneration grew up with an iPhone (or a smartphone) in hand. The corpus established in this research shows that the iGT speakers tend to parse expressions into shorter fragments, which are by nature prosodic domains on which tone sandhi operates. The syntax-prosody competition is keyed to a set of alignment and prosodic markedness constraints. An alternative approach under the Match Theory, on the other hand, renders incorrect predictions.