Prosodic and syntactic constraints conflict with each other.
 This is particularly evident in the expression of focus,
 where the best position for main stress does not necessarily
 match the best syntactic position for the focused constituent.
 But focus and stress must match, therefore either stress
 or the focused constituent must renounce their best position
 violating either the syntactic or the prosodic constraints
 responsible for it.

This study argues that human language addresses this tension
 in optimality theoretic terms. Focus paradigms across different
 languages only reflect different rankings of a shared invariant
 set of syntactic and prosodic constraints. In particular,
 only an optimality analysis can account for the focus paradigm
 of Italian while keeping a prosodic analysis of main stress
 in accord with the last two decades of phonological research.
 The analysis also extends naturally to focus paradigms in
 English, French, and Chichewa (including Chichewa's non-culminant
 sentences, i.e. sentences lacking a single main stress),
 making no appeal to language specific parametric devices.
 Overall, the conflicting nature of prosodic and syntactic
 constraints gives rise to a complex crosslinguistic typology
 from a single set of universal constraints while keeping
 interface conditions to an absolute minimum.



This paper revises (and supercedes) Samek-Lodovici 2002:ROA-524.