Metrical phonology in HPSG

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach to the prosody-syntax interface in HPSG. Previous approaches to prosody in HPSG (Klein, 2000; Haji-Abdolhosseini, 2003) represent prosodic information by constructing metrical constituent structure in the tradition of (Selkirk, 1980; Liberman and Prince, 1977). One drawback of this approach is that it does not allow for a direct representation of purely metrical constraints, which are relegated to an unformalized performance component. By contrast, so called 'grid only' approaches (Prince, 1983; Selkirk, 1984; Delais-Roussarie, 2000) use a single data structure, a metrical grid, to encode prosodic constraints resulting from syntax and constraints of a rhythmic nature. We first review relevant data from French showing that prosodic constituency is much less constrained by syntactic structure than is predicted by existing approaches. In all but very short utterances, many different prosodic groupings are possible for a given sentence with a determinate information structure, and rhythmic factors determine a preference ordering on the possible groupings. We then present an HPSG implementation of the metrical grid, and propose minimal syntactic constraints on relative prominence, leaving room for noncategorical rythmic constraints to choose between alternatives. We finish by discussing the interaction of the metrical grid with the rest of the prosodic grammar.