ON THE SYNTAX-PROSODY INTERFACE: AN ANALYSIS OF THE PROSODIC PROPERTIES OF POSTFOCAL MATERIAL IN ITALIAN AND ITS IMPLICATIONS *

In this paper, I discuss some properties of the prosodic system of Tuscan Italian argued for in Bocci & Avesani (2005, 2008) and their implications for a model of the syntax-prosody interface. Building on the cartographic approach (Cinque 1999, Rizzi 2004a, 2006), I argue for a model in which scope-discourse properties such as topic and focus are encoded as features in the syntactic representation starting from the numeration (Aboh 2007). In such a view, a direct link between LF and PF is dispensed with, in compliance with the T-model of grammar and current minimalist assumptions. I argue that the syntactic output where scopediscourse properties are explicitly encoded (Rizzi 2004b), is converted at spell-out into the prosodic representation by two interacting sets of mapping rules: default rules and marked feature-sensitive rules (see Selkirk 2007). Building on Bocci & Avesani’s (2008) prosodic analysis of postfocal material in Tuscan Italian, I argue that, even if discourse features (and the syntactic structure) feed the prosodic computation, the application of mapping rules (in interaction with structural requirements) does not guarantee isomorphism either between the prosodic representation and the syntactic structure, or between the prosodic representation and the informational properties. I argue that such a conclusion is expected to the extent to which prosody is part of the morpho-phonological component.

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