Bengali Intonation Revisited: An Optimality Theoretic Analysis in which FOCUS Stress Prominence Drives FOCUS Phrasing

In this paper, I want to investigate the consequences of an idea about focus prosody that was first put forward by Jackendoff 1972, namely the hypothesis that the focusphonology interface in grammar is expressed as a relation between focus-marked syntactic constituents on the one hand, and prosodic stress prominence on the other. A strong form of the hypothesis, advocated in Truckenbrodt’s 1995 thesis and pursued here and in other recent work of mine (e.g. Selkirk 2002), is that the focus-phonology interface consists only of interface constraints on the relation between syntactic focus and prosodic prominence. All the other predictable, non-morphological, phonological properties of focus are claimed to be derived as a consequence of phonological markedness constraints on the relation between prosodic prominence and other aspects of phonological representation. This proposal can be called the Focus-Prominence theory of the focus-phonology interface. I think this theory provides an insightful account of the array of phonological properties that are associated with focus crosslinguistically, and at the same time explains the observed generalizations about focus projection and the distribution of focus-related prominence within the sentence. The question of focus projection is not addressed in this paper (but see Selkirk 1999, 2000; Selkirk and Katz, in preparation). What I want to show here is that Focus Prominence theory provides the basis for an understanding of focus-related phonological phrasing. In this I am following a path first charted out by Truckenbrodt 1995.

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