Morphology & Syntax workshop

May 20, 2022 | 12:30PM
Social Sciences 108

The Morphology & Syntax Workshop will meet this Friday, 5/20/22 from 12:30-2:30pm in Social Sciences 108. We are happy to be hosting Zach Lebowski (UChicago) who will be discussing his work "." We invite participants to attend in person to engage with Zach's work together! However, we will still plan to hold the workshop in hybrid format to accommodate online participants.

 

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Are prosodic boundaries directional? 

 Zach Lebowski (UChicago)

 

Selkirk (2011) argues that High Tone Spreading in Xitsonga (Bantu, South Africa & Mozambique) can cross the right edge of a phonological phrase but cannot cross the left edge of a phonological phrase. If Selkirk’s interpretation of the data is correct, then prosodic representations must be hierarchical and recursive. In this meeting, I’ll present a theory of the correspondence between syntactic and prosodic structure that assumes prosodic representations are non-hierarchical. We’ll see that the Xitsonga data poses a serious challenge to the theory, and then, we’ll discuss how the theory may be amended or the data may be interpreted to overcome the challenge.