No abstract

No abstract

It is a well-known fact that across the world’s languages there is a fairly strong asymmetry in the affixation of grammatical material, in that suffixes considerably outnumber prefixes in typological databases. This article argues that prosody, specifically prosodic phrasing, plays an important part in bringing about this asymmetry. Prosodic word and phrase boundaries may occur after a clitic function word preceding its lexical host with sufficient frequency so as to impede the fusion required for affixhood. Conversely, prosodic boundaries rarely, if ever, occur between a lexical host and a clitic function word following it. Hence, prosody does not impede the fusion process between lexical hosts and postposed function words, which therefore become affixes more easily. Evidence for the asymmetry in prosodic phrasing is provided from two sources: disfluencies, and ditropic cliticization, that is, the fact that grammatical proclitics may be phonological enclitics (i.e. phrased with a preceding host), but grammatical enclitics are never phonological proclitics. Earlier explanations for the suffixing preference have neglected prosody almost completely and thus also missed the related asymmetry in ditropic cliticization. More importantly, the evidence from prosodic phrasing suggests a new venue for explaining the suffixing preference. The asymmetry in prosodic phrasing, which, according to the hypothesis proposed here, is a major factor underlying the suffixing preference, has a natural basis in the mechanics of turn-taking as well as in the mechanics of speech production.*

This study is concerned with the identifiability of intonational phrase boundaries across familiar and unfamiliar languages. Four annotators segmented a corpus of more than three hours of spontaneous speech into intonational phrases. The corpus included narratives in their native German, but also in three languages of Indonesia unknown to them. The results show significant agreement across the whole corpus, as well as for each subcorpus. We discuss the interpretation of these results, including the hypothesis that it makes sense to distinguish between phonetic and phonological intonational phrases, and that the former are a universal characteristic of speech, allowing listeners to segment speech into intonational phrase-sized units even in unknown languages.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Little is known about depictive secondary predicates such as raw in She ate the fish raw in languages other than a few European ones. The goal of this paper is to broaden the database for this grammatical construction by reviewing its recurring formal properties, introducing a crosslinguistically applicable definition and delimiting it from other, semantically and/or morphosyntactically similar constructions. In particular, we will show that the distinction between depictives and adverbials is much less clearcut, both in formal and semantic terms, than is often assumed. First, languages may not formally distinguish the two construction types. Second, in languages with genuine depictive constructions distinct from adverbials, expressions that have generally been analysed as adverbials (e.g., expressions of concomitance, manner, location, and even time) may exhibit the formal properties of depictives. As a consequence, we argue that adverbial and depictive constructions are in competition, in the sense that languages may have different cut-off points for the two construction types on an implicational hierarchy ranging from typical depictive content to typical adverbial content.