Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Ce séminaire reçoit des conférenciers invités spécialisés dans différents domaines de la linguistique. Les membres du Département, les étudiants et les personnes externes intéressées sont tous cordialement invités.

Description du séminaire Print

Titre Syntax versus information structure: the prosodic landscape of Turkish clauses
Conférencier Guliz Günes
Date mardi 02 octobre 2018
Heure 12h15
Salle L208 (Bâtiment Candolle)
Description

In terms of its prosodic typological classification Turkish is a phrase language in Féry’s (2010) terms. As such, unlike intonational languages, such as English and German, the prosodic grammar of Turkish lacks designated pitch accents (or tonal combinations) as indicators of foci or topics, which makes it easier to trace the matches and mismatches with the corresponding syntactic structures. In this talk, presenting an overview of the prosodic landscape of declarative clauses in Turkish, I will discuss some cases in which there is a mismatch between syntactic and prosodic constituency. I will then lay out a phonological markedness account that successfully predicts each case of mismatch in addition to certain cases of optional prosodic phrasing. I will also discuss how prosodic prominence is derived, and how it interacts with information structurally marked environments (such as in structures with narrow focus and a given domain). As in many other languages with rather flexible word order, Turkish employs two strategies to align the focused item with the prosodically prominent area of a sentence. First is via prosodic phrasing (which often requires a deviation from faithfully mapped prosodic constituency, i.e. a mismatch), and the second is via word order alternations, which often have other syntactic and semantic consequences. Upon discussing these two strategies, we will see how syntax and prosody sometimes collaborate to help expressing information structural meanings in Turkish.

   
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