Unaccentedness and the formation of prosodic structure in Lekeitio Basque

Abstract

AbstractIn Lekeitio Basque, radical mismatches between the morphosyntactic phrase structure of a sentence and the phonological/prosodic phrase structure of the phonological output representation appear when one or more of the words of a sentence display(s) unaccentedness, i.e., lack(s) lexical accent. Evidence of these constituency mismatches is provided by the distribution of predictable phrasal edge tones and prosodic-structure-sensitive patterns of pitch downstep and upstep. A purely phonological, optimality-theoretic analysis of the mismatches is given. This phonological analysis relies on assuming that morphosyntactic constituent structure is spelled out as prosodic constituent structure in the input representation of the phonology module and that a language-particular ranking of purely phonological constituency faithfulness and markedness constraints relates the constituency of the phonological input to the constituency of the phonological output representation.