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The phonology and syntax of wh-expressions in Tangale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2020

Michael Kenstowicz
Michael Kenstowicz*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
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Extract

Study of the phonology-syntax interface has typically proceeded by asking the following question: what aspects of syntactic structure are relevant for the application of phonological rules? Several years’ study of the question by a number of persons (e.g. Kaisse 1985; Selkirk 1984) suggests that phonological rules may be sensitive, either directly or indirectly, to the surface-syntactic constituent structure – typically through extension of the notion of government or c-command. Phrasal phonological rules do not appear to be sensitive to differences in grammatical relations (e.g. subject vs. object) unless these are encoded as different surface constituent structures. Nor do phrasal phonological rules (as opposed to lexical rules) appear to be sensitive to different syntactic features such as [±noun] or [±wh].

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 4 , May 1987 , pp. 229 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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Footnotes

*

I wish to acknowledge the help of Mairo Kidda and the comments of the following persons on an earlier version of this paper: J. Higgenbotham, J. Kaye, P. Kiparsky, G. Pullum, L. Rizzi and L. Tuller.

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