August 6th Forum Lecture: From Prosody toward Explanation?

Presenters: Marianne Mithun

There is now a rich and voluminous literature on relations between prosodic and syntactic structure, and interesting work continues to emerge. A basic observation is that speakers speak in spurts, or intonation units. Some models take syntactic structure as their point of departure and describe processes by which prosodic structure can be derived from it, considering how mismatches between syntactic constituents and prosodic units might be accounted for. Others begin with prosodic structure and consider how grammatical structure might emerge from it over time. With the second approach, it is generally agreed that syntactic and morphological structures tend to develop from the crystalization of frequently occurring sequences of adjacent elements, presumably within the same intonation unit. A closer look at languages which differ syntactically and morphologically from those on which much prosodic analysis has been based can help us to enrich our understanding of such processes. Prosody in Mohawk (Kanien’kéha’) reflects the organization of information at levels from discourse, through sentence-level syntax to fully crystalized morphology, with varying degrees of formal and functional categoriality. A close look at speaker choices in unscripted speech indicates that it is not simple adjacency within the intonation unit that shapes the gradual crystalization of structures, but rather the cognitive organization of ideas underlying the prosodic structure. The trajectory has not stopped with the development of morphology, however. The emergence of the rich morphology has in turn profoundly shaped modern syntactic structure.

Presenters

Marianne Mithun

University of California, Santa Barbara

Marianne Mithun is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her interests include morphology, syntax, discourse, prosody, and their interrelations; language contact and language change; typology and universals; language documentation; and language revitalization. Her work has included special focus on languages indigenous to North America and languages of the Austronesian family.