Research, Hubert Truckenbrodt
| interface interactions –– wh-questions –– sentence types –– intonational meaning –– modals –– syn.-phon. interface –– f0 height –– for teachers –– neurolinguistics |
Research, Hubert Truckenbrodt |
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Phonological phrases are prosodic (i.e. phonological) constituents that are larger than prosodic words and smaller than intonation phrases. They are, I believe, cross-linguistically derived from syntactic XPs. The phonological phenomena associated with them may differ from language to langauge.
In my Ph.D. thesis I argue with reference to data from a range of Bantu languages, the native-American language Tohono O'odham (Papago), Japanese and other languages that two constraints go a long way in predicting patterns of phonological phrases across languages: Stress-XP (every XP must contain a beat of stress that is the prosodic head of a phonological phrase) and Wrap-XP (every XP must be contained in a phonological phrase). I also argue that the domain in which focus attracts the strongest stress is not the sentence but the semantic scope of the focus, (the domain ~[...] in the theory of focus by Rooth (1992)). I furthermore suggest and defend that this stress-attraction by the focus is the only prosodic effect of focus across languages, to the exclusion of edge-alignment with the focus by linguistic constraints, or constraints requiring destressing of elements outside of the focus.
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 1995. Phonological Phrases: Their Relation to Syntax, Focus, and Prominence, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
The arguments for Wrap-XP are published separately in the following paper, in interaction with Lisa Selkirk's Align-XP.
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 1999. On the relation between syntactic phrases and phonological phrases. Linguistic Inquiry 30. 219-255.
The following paper explores patterns of phonological phrasing in Brazilian Portuguese. It includes a suggestion about a connection of the accounts of Romance phrasing-patterns by Nespor and Vogel (1986, 1989) to the XP-based view pursued in Selkirk (1986, 1995, 2011) and in my work.
Sandalo, Filomena & Hubert Truckenbrodt. 2002. Some Notes on Phonological Phrasing in Brazilian Portuguese. Delta 18. 1-30.
The following paper explors an account of the phonological phrasing of Bengali (Hayes and Lahiri 1991, Fitzpatrick-Cole 1994) in terms of output-to-output faithfulness. I have not further pursued this idea since then. If you take a closer look, you can see that some of the isomorphy-predictions of the output-to-output faithfulness account (some that cannot be derived by Stress-XP, Wrap-XP and/or Align-XP) are made in a different way in the Match-theory of Selkirk (2011).
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2003. Variation in p-phrasing in Bengali. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 2. 259-303.
This handbook article reviews a number of suggestions about stress-assignment from the literature and discusses some advantages of applying Stress-XP from my thesis to English and German. The effects of focus, givenness and pronominal status on the prosody are also briefly discussed .
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2006. Phrasal Stress. In Keith Brown (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics, 2nd edition, Vol. 9, 572-579. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
The following handbook article reviews literature on phonological phrases, concentrating on effects of Align-XP / Stress-XP and Wrap-XP. The discussion includes patterns from Bantu languages, Chinese languages, Romance languages, English, and German.
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2007. The syntax phonology interface. In Paul de Lacy (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of phonology, 435-456. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
In an experiment about the prosody of German object clauses, 'dass'-clauses and V2-object-clauses behaved alike. The presentation of these results is embedded in a theoretical discussion that addresses how Stress-XP, in its application to German, interacts with syntactic movement (Bresnan 1971). An effect of this interaction is that sometimes (but not always) the stress-patterns that are derived on the basis of the underlying syntactic structures are preserved under movement.
Truckenbrodt, Hubert & Isabell Darcy. 2010. Object clauses, movement, and phrasal stress. In Nomi Erteschik-Shir & Lisa Rochman (eds.), The sound patterns of syntax, 189-216. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Further application of Stress-XP to German is developed in the following paper, in a comparative discussion with the theory in terms of phases by Kratzer and Selkirk (2007). The discussion touches on the mysteriously stressless PPs that are important to the account of Kratzer and Selkirk. It also touches on how stress-assignment interacts in a different way with the presence of pronouns and the presence of syntactic traces.
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2012. Effects of indefinite pronouns and traces on verb stress in German. In Toni Borowsky, Shigeto Kawahara, Takahito Shinya & Mariko Sugahara (eds.), Prosody matters: essays in honor of Elisabeth Selkirk, 487-513. Sheffield, UK & Bristol, USA: Equinox.
Intonation phrases are the prosodic level above the phonological phrase. They seem to be related to clauses and root sentences.
This paper evaluates systematic recordings made with one speaker of German. The speaker has a clear sign of the end of intonation phrases in her sentence melody (upstep). The complex sentences investigated include subject clauses in the Vorfeld, relative clauses in the Mittelfeld, object clauses in the Nachfeld, as well as embedded coordinated object clauses in the Nachfeld. It is found that intonation phrase boundaries occur at all right edges of all embedded clauses but not at the left edges of any of the investigated embedded clauses. This can be accounted for by a constraint that right-aligns clauses and intonation phrases.
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2005. A short report on intonation phrase boundaries in German. Linguistische Berichte 203. 273-296.
This is distinct from the suggestion in B. Downing (1970) for English that genuinely embedded clauses do not trigger obligatory intonation phrase boundaries at their edges, while unembedded (root) sentences do. A way of reconciling this is explored.
Selkirk (2011) takes a remark by Potts (2005) a step further and suggests that the unembedded root sentences of B. Downing (1970) are 'illocutionary clauses'. In other words, clauses that are speech acts trigger obligatory intonation phrase boundaries. In the following paper this suggestion is tested in German, employing sentence adverbs and modal particles to test for speech acts. Intonation phrases are assessed by way of intuitions about the presence of sentence stress that rest on the upstep phenomenon discussed in my tonal-height papers. The discussion includes coordinated DPs, coordinated V2-clauses, appositive relatives, appositions, right dislocation and afterthought, multiple focus, peripheral adverbial clauses, and parentheticals. It is argued that
(a) Selkirk is right: speech act CPs are mapped to intonation phrases, but
(b) expanding on Dehe (2009), there are many cases that are unexpectedly neither intonation phrase triggers nor speech acts, including certain coordinated V2-sentences, certain appositions, certain cases of pronoun resumption and certain parentheticals.
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2015. Intonation phrases and speech acts. In Marlies Kluck, Dennis Ott and Marc de Vries (eds.), Parenthesis and ellipsis: cross-linguistic and theoretical perspectives. Mouton de Gruyter.
[This paper is also listed under 'Interface interactions' on this web-site.]