Prosodic Scrambling in Japanese

As Koizumi (2000) and Fukui and Sakai (2006) observe, however, “multiple long-distance scrambling” improves significantly if the scrambled element forms an intonational phrase, though we rather argue that the relevant phonological phrase is not an intonational phrase but a major phrase (aka “intermediate phrase”). The boundary of a major phrase is often marked by a pause or glottalization. The major phrase is also the domain for catathesis (downstep in McCawley 1968). In (4), the major phrase is italicized and put in parentheses; a major phrase contains two or more recursively embedded minor phrases, each consisting of one or more non-lexical words (like sono ‘that’) plus a lexical word (like tegami ‘letter’ or Bill-ni ‘BillDAT’):