Bi-directionality at the PF-Interface

Explaining Adjunction Stress Patterns in West Germanic

Abstract

Theories regarding the connection between prosodic stress assignment and phrasal hierarchy abound in modern linguistic studies. The counter-cyclic behavior of adjunction structures (Late Adjunction Hypothesis - Lebeaux 1988) poses a problem for most accounts of prosodic mapping parasitically acting upon syntactic-generated structures. Feng's bi-directional model of prosody-syntax interaction (2003b) accounts for the intricate relationship between prosodic stress assignment and late adjunction structure in West Germanic in a parsimonious fashion unachieved by recent amendments to the Nuclear Stress Rule (Cinque 1993, Zubizarreta 1998). Furthermore, it is argued that Nachfeld adjuncts, i.e., adjunction structures that appear after the lowest VP in an SOV language, can be assigned prosodic prominence contra the Structural Removing Condition (Feng 2003a).