23 - Syntax, information structure,and prosody

Summary

This chapter surveys the relation between syntactic structure, information structure, and prosodic structure. It explicates what prosodic structures look like in general, and which prosodic structures go with which syntactic structures. As suggested by this formulation, the perspective here is that syntax and prosody are each generative systems, which independently define two sets of well-formed structures, one of syntactic phrase markers and one of prosodic structures. The two aspects of (English) prosody most easily detected by naive listeners are (relative) prominence and pauses or breaks. An empirically plausible, and theoretically interesting hypothesis is that syntax should be 'phonology free'. Extraneous features influence the shape of prosodic structure, but the ultimate realization of focus and other information structural features is best understood as an interplay between narrow syntactic mapping constraints, prosody-internal well-formedness constraints and constraints of extraneous feature mapping like Focus Prominence.