Recent thought on grammatical architectures have underlined some discriminating features of the syntax-semantics interface: their syntactocentric nature when syntactic structures are mapped or transduced to semantics (and phonology); or their parallel nature, when semantics (and phonology) communicates with syntax via a nondirectional (or relational) interface. This duality arises for instance ...

It is an assumption of most models of syntax that phonological features are not present during syntactic derivations, thus cannot influence syntactic structure (cf. Pullum & Zwicky 1986, 1988 ). A process that might challenge such an assumption is phonologically determined agreement, where phonological and not syntactic or semantic features agree across elements in a clause or discourse. Such a...

Many phonological phenomena are conditioned by extra-phonological, especially morpho-syntactic information. The goal of this talk is to suggest that whenever there are concurrent representational and procedural solutions for the transmission of morpho-syntactic information , advantage is to be given to the latter. Indeed, we argue that procedural analyses allow for a control outside of the phon...

This study aims at providing an empirical basis for the evaluation of predictions made by metrical phonology. The predictions are compared to perceptual syllable prominence annotated in a database of German read speech. An evaluation baseline was defined on the correlation between prominence ratings for different speakers. Then, different sets of rules for prominence prediction were tested and ...

This paper argues for a model of morphology and phonology in which phonological form is represented purely in terms of markedness rather than by strings of segments. The argument runs as follows: (i) underlying representations are prosodified; (ii) this makes them relatively ill-formed; (iii) so representations can be represented purely in terms of ill-formedness. Step (i) brings to its logical...

A variety of syntactic phenomena seem to involve a ban on multiple adjacent identical objects. I develop a theory of phenomena of this type, positing a constraint on linearization at the syntax-phonology interface which prevents linearization of structurally adjacent syntactic objects with the same label. The claim is that linearization statements make reference only to node labels, not to part...

Progress in linking between the disparate levels of cognitive description and neural implementation requires explicit, testable, computationally based hypotheses. One such hypothesis is the dendrophilia hypothesis, which suggests that human syntactic abilities rely on our supra-regular computational abilities, implemented via an auxiliary memory store (a ‘stack’) centred on Broca’s region via i...