Prosodic Phonology in LFG: A New Proposal

In this paper we outline a new architecture for modeling the interaction between syntax and prosody. This architecture does not make use of correspondences between separate projections, but it is still consonant with the overall framework of LFG. We propose that prosodic information is developed in a component that operates independently of the syntax, thus allowing easy description of misalignment phenomena. We also propose a very simple way of making prosodic information accessible to syntax, so that it is possible to condition syntactic rules and preferences on prosodic boundaries. We place the prosodic and syntactic components of the grammar in a pipeline configuration such that the terminal string of the syntactic tree (the LFG c-structure) is a sequence of lexical formatives intermixed with features inserted by the prosodic component. Depending on how they are distributed with respect to syntactic groupings, those features may or may not have an impact on the syntactic analysis.