Dr. Anja Arnhold

Prosody-syntax interactions, typology and linguistic complexity

Languages differ vastly in the flexibility and complexity of their prosodic systems, as well as in the flexibility and complexity of other areas of grammar. Typology and research on prosody-syntax interactions often assume that this involves a trade-off relationship. For example, English pervasively uses its flexible prosody to mark information structure, but has relatively inflexible syntax (e.g. SHE likes her, She LIKES her and She likes HER are all grammatical, but Her likes she is not), whereas flexible word order in languages like Italian and Finnish regularly expresses information structure and is combined with restricted prosodic flexibility. These patterns are expected based on the common assumption that language has evolved to be efficient and to avoid redundancy, and that complexity in one component of language (e.g. syntax) restricts complexity in another component (e.g. prosody).

However, languages usually have more than one grammatical means for marking information structure (e.g. passives and clefts are available in English). This means that complexity trade-offs could be predicted to emerge also when comparing different utterances within a language: Will speakers and listeners use prosody when information structure is already marked by other means, for example via clefting? Will they use other means more when prosody is not available – and vice versa? Does this differ between languages, depending on the inherent complexity of their prosodic and morpho-syntactic systems?

This talk will introduce a new SSHRC IG project investigating these questions for English, Mandarin and Kalaallisut, which were chosen as a typologically representative set of languages. Based on the results of past studies, the project will look for both qualitative and quantitative trade-offs between prosody and morpho-syntax by comparing their use across the languages as well as within the same language under different experimentally induced conditions.