10. Size Effects in Prosody: Branch-Counting, Leaf-Counting, and Uniformity
Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory - Theory and Analyses - Jennifer Bellik
Jennifer Bellik [+ ]
University of California, Santa Cruz
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Jennifer Bellik is postdoctoral researcher in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA.
Nicholas Van Handel [+ ]
PhD student, University of California, Santa Cruz
Nicholas Van Handel is a graduate research assistant for the SPOT project and a Ph.D. student, Department of Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz.
Description
Constraints on Binarity are commonly used to capture size effects: the tendency for longer strings to be parsed into more prosodic constituents. In some implementations, binarity is assessed locally by counting immediate children (= branch-counting); in others, binarity is assessed globally by counting all descendants of some category (= leaf-counting). Branch-counting binarity motivates size-driven prosodic recursion, and operates as a special case of Match(XP). In contrast, leaf-counting binarity motivates size-driven category promotion, and conflicts with Match(XP), leading to larger typology sizes. A constraint on Uniformity is shown to be able to derive size-driven mismatches as well.