| ROA: | 174 |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Optimal Second Position in Pashto |
| Authors: | Taylor Roberts |
| Comment: | 40 pp.; requires SIL IPA font |
| Length: | 40 |
| Abstract: | The optimal second position in Pashto Taylor Roberts, MIT Tegey (1977) argues that some interesting interactions between clitic placement and phonology in Pashto cannot be accommodated by a strictly derivational model of grammar, in which there is a strict separation between the syntactic and phonological components; rather, Tegey suggests that phonological rules must be interleaved among syntactic ones. Contributing to the appearance of the unusual interactions between clitic placement and phonology has been the assumption that second position clitic placement in Pashto is a syntactic process. This paper shows that the extent to which syntactic structure contributes to clitic placement is narrowly constrained by principles for the mapping of syntactic structure to prosodic structure (Selkirk 1986). Thus, clitic placement in Pashto may be determined in the phonological component of the grammar. Pursuing recent ideas of Anderson (1996) regarding second position phenomena, Pashto clitics will be shown to be particularly well suited to an analysis within Optimality Theory, since clitics appear in second position (after the first constituent), but may appear farther to the left edge or to the right edge, under the force of highly ranked prosodic constraints. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |