This article analyzes mismatches between syntactic and prosodic constituency in Irish and attempts to understand those mismatches in terms of recent proposals about the nature of the syntax-prosody interface. It argues in particular that such mismatches are best understood in terms of Selkirk's (2011) Match Theory, working in concert with constraints concerned with rhythm and phonological balance. An apparently anomalous rightward movement that seems to target certain pronouns and shift them rightward is shown to be fundamentally a phonological process: a prosodic response to a prosodic dilemma. The article thereby adds to a growing body of evidence for the role of phonological factors in shaping constituent order.

This paper presents an overview of the phonetics and phonology of Mayan languages. The focus is primarily descriptive, but the article also attempts to frame the sound patterns of Mayan languages within a larger typological and theoretical context. Special attention is given to areas which are ripe for further descriptive or theoretical investigation.

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This article deals with a so-far unnoticed phenomenon in prosodic phonology, which we dub prosodic smothering. Prosodic smothering arises when the prosodic status of a clitic or affix varies with the presence or absence of some outer morpheme. We first illustrate prosodic smothering with novel data from two genetically unrelated languages, Macedonian (Slavic) and Kaqchikel (Mayan). We then provide a unified account of prosodic smothering based on a principled extension of the theory of prosodic subcategorization (e.g., Inkelas 1990 , Peperkamp 1997 , Chung 2003 , Yu 2003 , Paster 2006 , Bye 2007 ). Prosodic subcategorization typically involves requirements placed on items to the left or the right of the selecting morpheme. We show that prosodic smothering naturally emerges in a theory that also allows for subcategorization in the vertical dimension, such that morphemes may select for the prosodic category that immediately dominates them in surface prosodic structure. This extension successfully reduces two apparent cases of nonlocal prosodic conditioning to the effects of strictly local prosodic selection.

. However, this conclusion is not universally accepted (e.g. Vogel 2009a), and even the need for prosodic categories has been recently disputed (e.g. Scheer 2012b). In this article I argue that the prefixal phonology of Kaqchikel provides clear and convincing evidence for unbounded (iterable) recursion of the prosodic word ω. Patterns of [ʔ]-insertion and degemination receive a simple, elegant treatment if recursion of the prosodic word is permitted. Theories of prosodic phonology which do without recursion are forced to resort to ad hoc stipulations to account for the same facts. Both derivational (e.g. Kiparsky 1982) and transderivational (e.g. Benua 2000) analyses of these patterns fail on morphological grounds. The overall conclusion is that both abstract prosodic structure and recursion of the prosodic word are indispensable parts of any theory of word-level phonology.