syntax-prosody

Range in the use and realization of BIN in African American English

This paper jointly considers syntactic, semantic and phonological/phonetic factors in approaching an understanding of BIN, a remote past marker in African American English that has been described as "stressed". It brings together data from the Corpus …

Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan

Samoan is an ergative-marking, (reportedly) non-tonal Polynesian language in which ergative case is marked segmentally, but absolutive case has been said to be unmarked. This paper shows that in fact, a high edge tone co-occurs with absolutive …

Parsing with Minimalist Grammars and prosodic trees

Advances in the syntactic parsing of written language have proceeded apace in the last few decades, but much less progress has been made in the syntactic parsing of spoken language. Here, we address one question important for such progress: how can …

(In)variability in the Samoan syntax/prosody interface and consequences for syntactic parsing

While it has long been clear that prosody should be part of the grammar influencing the action of the syntactic parser, how to bring prosody into computational models of syntactic parsing has remained unclear. The challenge is that prosodic …