Prosodic differences among function words

Abstract

Function words in standard Serbian fall into two classes: prosodically free functional elements on the one hand, and prosodically bound functional elements, or clitics, on the other. The two classes have overlapping syntactic distributions, yet exhibit clear prosodic differences. Free functional elements may become prosodic words if they are minimally disyllabic, or if focused, and in this they crucially differ from clitics, whose only prosodic option is to be included into the host prosodic word. It is argued that the prosodic properties of the two classes of function words cannot be captured by a single set of ranked constraints, and that one of the classes, the class of clitics, needs to be encoded lexically, by virtue of prosodic prespecification.