On words and phrases in phonology: A comparative study with focus on German

Abstract

Since Selkirk's 1972 dissertation on phrasal phonology, phonologists agree that there are domains of rule or constraint application above the word that have to be accounted for. Numerous proposals have been made since then in order to derive these domains on the basis of the syntactic structure.
In the eighties, one of the biggest issues was the extent to which phonology had access to syntactic information; e.g. whether phonological rules referred dilectly to syntactic structure (cf. the work by Kaisse, Odden, etc.) or to an intervening prosodic structure, as most phonologists assume. How is this prosodic structure related to the syntax? The most influencing proposals on this topic are summed up in the sections 1.4 and 1.4.2.
In the beginning of the nineties the powerful effects that focus has on the phonological phrasing were recognized. Crosslinguistically, narrow focus on a constituent overrides prosodic phrasing (see Kenesei & Vogel 1990, Hayes & Lahiri 1991). By this, prosody can also disambiguate the syntax.
Nowadays, the main focus of research in the area of phonology-syntax interface has shifted to the question which constraints govern the syntax-phonology mapping.

This thesis is concerned with the domains of phonological processes that are larger than the word. The aim of the thesis is to defend the following three claims on the syntax-phonology-mapping:

I. There are two types of languages with respect to the mapping of syntax into phonological domains: phrase-based languages and word-based languages.
II. The postlexical phonology is subdivided into a rhythmic and a segmental component.
III. The mapping of syntax into phonology interacts with the speech rate.