The IP as the Domain of Syllabification

Evidence suggests that in Iwaija, a non-Pama-Nyungan language of northern Australia, the Intonation Phrase (IP) is an integrated entity, one which is typical of a cursus language (Pulgram,1970) like French, in which words in connected speech give up some of the properties they exhibit in isolation. A salient feature of the prosody of this language is syllabification across content word boundaries. The paper examines the way in which this phenomenon relates to two influential versions of the prosodic hierarchy, both of which suggest that syllabification is subsumed, one way or another, within the boundaries of word-sized units. On the basis of acoustic analysis, the paper suggests that the IP, rather than the Phonological or Prosodic Word may form the domain for syllabification in Iwaija.