| ROA: | 184 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Some Optimality Principles of Sentence Pronunciation |
| Authors: | David Pesetsky |
| Comment: | 49pp. File marked "Other" is a compressed (.sit.hqx) Mac archive containing the Mac Word 5.1 file and SILDoulos (IPA) & Times-CE fonts |
| Length: | 49 |
| Abstract: | Some Optimality Principles of Sentence Pronunciation David Pesetsky Massachusetts Institute of Technology A central discovery of modern syntax has been the observation that words and phrases may simultaneously bear more than one single grammatical relation in a given sentence ("movement"). Much of the debate in the field has concerned where and how a phrase that bears multiple relations is pronounced. This debate became particularly interesting with the realization that the last position moved into (the head of a chain) is not always the position of pronunciation -- that is, with the discovery of "covert (LF) movement". The widely accepted solutions to this problem have involved a path to PF midway in the derivation of LF (variously analysed as S-structure or as the locus of spellout). This paper advances a different proposal. I argue that PF is a pronunciation of LF, not a pronunciation of an intermediate step of the syntactic derivation as in the GB/Minimalist tradition. The conditions that determine the proper pronunciation of LF interact according to the principles of OT. The input to the pronunciation system is an LF containing chains formed in accordance with a full copy theory of movement (extending Chomsky 1993). The job of the pronunciation system is to determine the pronunciation of the elements of these chains. The areas of greatest interest will involve pronunciation vs. deletion of complementizers and WH-forms in declarative, interrogative and relative clauses in English and French. The results of Broihier (ROA-46) on resumptive pronouns follow naturally, as the system is extended to cover principles of trace pronunciation. The paper was presented at the 1995 MIT "Good Enough" conference, was written in Summer 1996, and will appear shortly in the proceedings of the MIT conference. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |