The phonological word in linguistic models of phonology

If psycholinguists tend to oversimplify the nature of which linguistic unit delimits the span of encoding, linguists tend to do the opposite. While phonological word is employed by some authors (Selkirk, 1972; Hayes, 1989), others refer to rhythmic word (Pasdeloup, 1990) or unit (Di Cristo & Hirst, 1993), prosodic word (Vaissière, 1975), accentual phrase (Jun &

Fougeron, 2000) or group (Verluyten, 1982; Martin, 1977) or even phonological phrase (Nespor & Vogel, 1986; Post, 2000). And this list is by no means exhaustive. As we can see, the very first issue among linguists is the terminology itself given to the PW. Even though little coherence seems to emerge from the variety of labels, two major theoretical accounts can be distinguished. One for which only the prosodic properties of the PW are taken into account, and one for which the grammatical properties are also considered. We will examine how the PW is accounted for in both groups.

I.3.1 The strictly prosodic approach

In the first theoretical account, Hall (1999) claims that the PW is a prosodic domain and that this unit is larger than the syllable and the foot but shorter than the phonological phrase. This definition is very general and meant to apply to all languages. But one of the main difficulties with the PW is that the criteria defining it vary from one language to another. In English for example, the PW can be defined as a unit bearing one main stress. It cannot be more than one stress nor less (Evans & Green, 2006). In French, authors suggest that a PW contains at least one syllable but a maximum of seven (Wioland, 1985; Riegel, Pellat & Rioul, 1994; Martin,

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2009). Stressable syllables become necessarily stressed in order to prevent a succession of seven unstressed syllables; therefore, the PW in French can change depending on how the message is produced. If a speaker wants to stress part of his/her message, a specific syllable will be stressed and the PW might be different than if it had been produced in a neutral context. When applying these rules, one focuses strictly on the prosody of the message but ignores its grammatical properties. This is what defines the first group of researchers, namely a PW defined by a strictly prosodic approach (Hirst & Di Cristo, 1984; Jun & Fougeron, 2000).

I.3.2 The morpho-syntactic approach

In the second theoretical group, the morpho-syntactic properties of the message are taken into account when defining the PW (Selkirk, 1984, 2011; Nespor & Vogel, 1986; Delais-Roussarie, 1996, 2000; Mertens, 1993, 2008). Although this group agrees on the fact that morpho-syntactic features partly determine the borders of a PW, they do not all agree on how they operate and how much they regulate those processes. Many theoretical models of the interface between syntax and phonology have been proposed, and the purpose of our study is not to review all of them⁶; however, they can be classified into two major theories:

 The Direct Reference Theory according to which there exists a direct relationship between the phonological representations of words and their syntactic configurations (Kaisse, 1985; Rizzi & Savoia, 1993; Seidl, 2001).

 The Indirect Reference Theory (Nespor & Vogel 1986; Truckenbrodt, 1995) which on the contrary stipulates that this relationship between the phonological representations of words and their syntactic configurations is not necessarily direct and is instead mediated by phrasal prosodic constituents. This group includes models such as the prosodic hierarchy (Figure 2) originally proposed by Selkirk (1978, 1980, 1981).

6 For a complete review of all the different theories of the syntax-phonology interface, see Elordieta (2008).

19 Chapter 1: Psycholinguistic and linguistic accounts in the study of adjective-noun phrases

in French

Figure 2. The prosodic hierarchy (Selkirk 1980, 1984; Nespor and Vogel 1986; Hayes 1989).

Figure 2 (taken from Schiering, Hildebrandt & Bickel, 2007) is an elaborate version of the original model which clearly illustrates the intermediary levels between syntactic and phonological information. The lowest constituents (the mora (µ), the syllable (σ), the foot (φ)) are defined strictly phonologically, while all the constituents above (the prosodic word (ω), the clitic group (C), the phonological phrase (P), the intonational phrase (I)) are defined morpho-syntactically.

To illustrate the indirect reference theory, see the example below, taken from one of the few psycholinguistics articles dealing with the question of the prosodic units in speech production (Wheeldon & Lahiri, 1997):

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1. [[[The man]_NP [[I]_NP [[talked to]_V [in the school]_PP]_VP]_S]_NP [is ill]_VP]_S⁷ 2. [[[[The man]ω [I talked to]ω]φ[[in the school]ω]φ]_IP [[[is ill]ω]φ]_IP]_U

The first sentence represents the syntactic grouping of the sentence, while the second represents the prosodic structure. Even if the structure of the prosodic constituents (2) is strongly derived from the syntax of the sentence (1), a slight difference of grouping between the second NP and the verb demonstrates the two types of information are non-isomorphic but rather indirectly connected at some level. Whether one is in favour of the direct or indirect reference theory, none of the models proposed in the literature can clearly specify how the morpho-syntactic information relates to the generation of the prosodic structure precisely.

There has been a lot of debate between a strictly prosodic approach (I) and a morpho-syntactic approach (II) since the 1980s. More and more linguistic corpus based studies tend to agree on the latest approach (II). As for the few psycholinguistic studies investigating this question, experimental data tend to show that morpho-syntactic information does not intervene in the generation of the prosodic structure (Lahiri & Wheeldon, 2010). The question of whether phonological grouping is achieved in a syntactic fashion or a rhythmic one may remain unanswered, since all sentences can be grouped according to either fashion. What favors one approach or the other is speaking context, such as velocity, stress etc.; however, corpus based studies as well as psycholinguistics experiments cannot always take these parameters into account. The experimental tools available today may not be sufficient to simulate natural and spontaneous connected speech.

I.4 What are the implications for the investigation of encoding of