The class looks at prosodic structure and its relation to syntax and semantics. Generalizations about this relation turn out to be recursive: the phonological structure of a sentence in natural language can be analyzed compositionally based on the phonological properties of its parts, just as the semantic meaning of an expression is compositionally derived from the meaning of its parts, and we'll discuss how phonetic and phonological means serve to encode syntactic and semantic information.

Introduction: Recursive Generalization vs. Recursive Representation

Reading: Prosodic Evidence for Recursion?



Lecture 1: Prosodic Boundary Strength and Syntactic Bracketing

Reading: Coordinate Structures and Beyond



Lecture 2: Boundary Strength in Production and Perception

Readings: Watson & Gibson (2004), Clifton et al. (2002)



Lecture 3: Prosodic Prominence: Patterns of Prosodic Subordination

Readings: Ladd 2008, Wagner (2007)





Colloquium Talk: A Compositional Theory of Contrastive Topics





Lecture 4: Prosodic Prominence: More on Prosodic Subordination





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