[+wh] Complementizers Drive Phonological Phrasing in Fukuoka Japanese

Evidence from the intonation of wh questions in the Fukuoka dialect of Japanese is used to explore a recent proposal by Richards that the syntax-prosody interface includes a requirement for wh elements and their associated complementizers to be contained in the same phonological phrase. An examination of multiple wh questions and nested wh questions determines that this phrasing requirement originates with the complementizer, not with the wh element. 1. Prosodic structure and the syntax-phonology interface Syntactic information can affect phonology, as seen when differences in syntactic structure correlate with differences in the applicability or domain of phonological processes (Selkirk 1981, 1986; Kaisse 1985; Nespor and Vogel 1986; Chen 1987; Truckenbrodt 1999). However, the kinds of syntactic information that have been empirically demonstrated to have phonological consequences are quite limited. Thus, two fundamental goals of research in the syntax-phonology interface are first, to determine which aspects of syntactic structure do have relevance for the phonology, and second, to develop a linguistic model that accounts for the restricted nature of this interface. One perspective on the second question, stated explicitly by Inkelas (1989, p. 9) as the Indirect Reference Hypothesis, holds that phonological rules may not refer to syntactic constituency. Instead, syntactic constituency influences prosodic structure—in particular, the formation of phonological phrases —and it is prosodic structure to which apparently syntax-sensitive phonological processes actually refer. There are multiple approaches to modeling just how syntactic constituency influences prosodic structure, including the Edge Alignment model (Selkirk 1986; Chen 1987), according to which an individual language sets parameters to match left or right edges of syntactic XPs with left or right edges of phonological phrases; and the Mutiple Spell-Out model, according to which syntactic Spell-Out domains are mapped either directly (Ishihara 2007) or indirectly (Kratzer and Selkirk 2007) onto phonological phrases. For concreteness, a version of the Edge Alignment model is used here, but this choice is not crucial for the argument at hand; the Multiple Spell-Out approach is further discussed in §5. The main focus of this paper is a subpart of the first question: Which aspects of syntactic structure have relevance for the phonology? Specifically, it is shown here, based on the prosodic structure of wh questions in the Fukuoka dialect of Japanese, that the inventory of syntactic factors affecting phonological phrase formation must be expanded beyond the widely acknowledged factors in (1). (1) Syntactic influences on the phonological phrase (PhP) a. Syntactic constituency: Edges of maximal projections (XPs) may map to edges of PhPs (Selkirk 1986; Chen 1987), or Spell-Out domains may determine the extent of PhPs (Ishihara 2007; Kratzer and Selkirk 2007) b. Wrap-XP: A (lexical) XP may be required to be contained within some PhP (Truckenbrodt 1999)