Synopsis:
This volume brings together studies on morphosyntactic and phonological constituency from a host of languages across the Americas. The study expands on previous multivariate typological work on phonological domains by simultaneously coding the results of morphosyntactic constituency tests. The descriptions are geared towards developing a typology of constituency and linguistic levels in both morphosyntactic and phonological domains. The multivariate approach adopted in this volume deconstructs constituency tests and phonological domains into cross-linguistically comparable variables applying and extending autotypology method to the domain of constituent structure. Current methodologies for establishing constituents have been criticized for containing an in-built selection bias, where the results and interpretation of tests are chosen or sampled in such a fashion that specific analyses are prejudged to be correct or false in a non-rigorous fashion. The papers of this volume develop novel methodology for reporting and coding constituency variables for language description and comparison that seeks to reign in selection bias allowing theories concerning the relationship between morphosyntactic and phonological constituent structure to be more severely tested.
Weniger anzeigenSynopsis: This book is an investigation into aspects of prosody, intonation and the prosody-syntax interface in Totoli, an endangered Austronesian language. With a strongly data-driven approach, the study integrates a combination of experimental evidence from both production and perception with corpus-based evidence through descriptive and inferential statistics.
The study takes the prime structuring unit of speech – the Intonation Unit – as its principal unit of investigation. It presents a thorough description of the IU, develops an intonational model of it, and investigates the syntactic units it contains. The author argues that the data is best analysed by assuming recursive embedding of Intonation Units into Compound Intonation Units.
This research represents a significant advancement in our understanding of the nature of prosodic systems found in the languages of the region and in intonational systems in general. It is one of the few investigations into the intonation of Austronesian languages and its analytical proposals are relevant both to prosodic theory and to phonological typology.
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