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Review of THE PROSODIC WORD IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 22:41:48 -0300 From: Gisela Collischonn Subject: The Prosodic Word in European Portuguese
Vigário, Marina (2003) The Prosodic Word in European Portuguese, Mouton de Gruyter, Interface Explorations 6.
Reviewed by Gisela Collischonn, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Description
This book, a revised version of the author's doctoral thesis, is a phonological investigation of prosodic structure at the level of the prosodic word in European Portuguese (EP). An array of phonological properties that identify the prosodic word in EP are presented and, based on them, the prosodic structure related to affixes, clitics and compound words is proposed. It provides empirical support for prosodic theory, since it shows that the prosodic word has a role to play in EP. It argues also for the pertinence of the division into lexical and postlexical components in EP phonology. The thesis is divided into eight chapters. The first four provide the theoretical and empirical background; the following two chapters form the main part of the book. Chapter 5 presents the argumentation for specific prosodic structure associated to prefixes, suffixes, pronominal clitics and other clitic words. Vigário takes phonological evidence to support the view that prefixes, unlike suffixes, are adjoined to the following prosodic word creating a recursive prosodic structure. The same asymmetry is argued to explain the distribution of proclitics vs. enclitics. Chapter 6 argues that two prosodic words that belong to the same morphological or syntactic compound form a recursive structure, the compound prosodic word, which is distinct from the regular p-phrase. Chapter 7 provides empirical data about the reduction of function words and discusses the generality of these reduction processes and their status in grammar. Chapter 8 summarizes the results obtained in the previous chapters and points to issues of further research. The thesis comprises also two appendices (containing collected data (Appendix I) and tables containing the results for the empirical test of chapter 7), a list of references, and an index.
Critical evaluation
This work is a contribution to the study of the interface between phonology and morphosyntax, with special emphasis on the mapping of prosodic words from morphosyntactic structure. It is also a contribution to the description of EP since it displays a large amount of data about segmental processes, as well as prominence and tonal phenomena and phonotactic restrictions that had never been discussed before or had not been discussed in relation to the issue of prosodic word structure.
The book displays empirical support for some of the ideas proposed in Peperkamp (1997), Booij (1996) and others, about the prosodization of clitics and prefixes. It does not propose any novel theoretical mechanisms (except for the compound prosodic word), and its value lies mainly in demonstrating how some recent proposals in prosodic phonology (Peperkamp, 1997, Selkirk, 1995, Hayes, 1990) can be successfully employed in analysing EP data, uncover unnoticed aspects of the ponology of this language and solve descriptive problems. Language data come from the author's judgements and the judgements of other native speakers of the same variety about the acceptability/possibility of the application of rules/processes in certain environments. In addition, there was recourse to production data collected both in experimental conditions and in daily conversations or in the speech of the media. Restricting the analysis to one variety -the EP variety spoken in the Lisbon area- ensures the exhaustivity and consistency of the claims presented. Chapter 1 is an introduction, including a brief description of the theoretical backgrounds and a short review of the literature about the status of the clitic group and of the Strict Layering Hypothesis in Prosodic Phonology. Lexical Phonology is also mentioned, although the literature review focuses mainly on Prosodic Phonology (Nespor & Vogel, 1986, Selkirk, 1984, and Hayes, 1989). The chapter presents the diagnostics for the prosodic word and extends to issues like resyllabification and prosodic restructuring. Important for understanding what follows are some assumptions the author makes. (Throughout the remaining of the book, she is careful to supply evidence that support these assumptions). First, it is assumed that the Strict Layering Hypothesis may be relaxed, that is, if it is decomposed in related statements (along the lines of Selkirk, 1995), some of these statements may be violated. This assumption - which had already been taken in Peperkamp (1997) - allows for recursive prosodic structure that is argued for in chapters 5 and 6. Since an Optimality Theory perspective is not assumed, these statements should be understood as parameters, though this issue is not approached. Second, relating to the lexical/postlexical distinction, the idea of precompilation (Hayes, 1990) is adopted. This idea is applied to explain ambiguous behavior of host + clitic sequences, as regards the lexical/postlexical status. The other assumption is that (as has been argued in Booij (1988) and others) prosodic structure up to the level of the prosodic word is already present in the lexical component. This has consequences for the analysis, since phenomena that refer to the prosodic word may be either postlexical or lexical. Some diagnostics for prosodic words based on lexical processes will be relevant only for morphosyntactic structures derived in the lexicon, while other diagnostics, based on postlexical processes, will be relevant only for sequences obtained in the postlexical level. As regards the clitic group, the author adopts the thesis that it is not a needed prosodic category (Booij, 1988, 1996, Selkirk, 1995, and many others). Once the clitic group is excluded from the prosodic hierarchy, several alternative analyses of clitic plus host prosodic structure have to be investigated. These analyses are presented in chapter 1 and discussed carefully in chapter 5. Chapter 2 reviews previous studies on EP word phonology. The author states that 'the prosodic word domain is almost totally absent from the phonological descriptions of EP.' (p.62) So, the disperse references to the word obtained from a miscellanea of structuralist, generative and post- generative studies are presented and discussed. One exception are the reflections of the Brazilian linguist Câmara Jr. about the distinction between the morphological and the phonological word, that Vigário thoroughly reviews. Chapter 3 presents the phenomena that will be later on used to diagnose prosodic constituency. Each phenomenon is briefly described and then ascribed to the lexical/postlexical level of EP phonology. I reckon that it is important to learn about the phenomena and to be presented to independent evidence for the lexical or postlexical status of each of them. However, I do not believe that the amount of phenomena and data discussed in this chapter will be of easy reading to anyone not familiar with EP phonology. Some processes are too different in nature to be treated in the same chapter, while others are so similar that they can be easily confounded. Very helpful is a chart that summarizes the division of rules into lexical and postlexical levels at the end of the chapter. In Chapter 4 the issue of the affix or clitic behavior of stressless pronouns is approached. Stressless pronouns may occur inside inflectional affixes in EP, as in 'perceber- TE-ia' 'note -YOU -Conditional/3rdperson singular'. They may also trigger idiosyncratic segmental insertions and deletions, as in 'come-lo' 'eat, present 2ndperson singular - it', and, further, since they only admit verbs as their hosts, they show a selectivity that is characteristic behavior of affixes. Contrary to the position argued for in Zwicky (1987) and others that pronominal clitics have been reanalyzed as inflectional affixes, Vigário presents evidence that they are attached to the verb only in the post-lexical level, while inflectional affixation is considered to happen only in the lexicon. First, as far as word stress is concerned, clitics do not modify their host's stress location. Second, there are processes that do not apply to host + clitic sequences, while they apply to base + suffix. One example: in EP /e/ changes to a half- open central vowel when followed by a palatal segment; this centralization applies across the morphological juncture in 'Europe + -izar' 'to turn into European', but not in the host + clitic juncture in 'dê-lho' 'give it to him'. Since there is independent motivation for considering centralization and other processes as lexical, they constitute evidence that host + clitic sequences are obtained only postlexically. Suffixes, on the other hand, are attached to their base in the lexical level and are, therefore, input to stress assignment and other lexical processes. The above-mentioned aspects that point to a lexical status of these cliticizations -'mesoclisis', segmental substitutions- are accounted for with precompiled rules and allomorphy. Chapter 5 deals with the prosodic structure of affixations and cliticizations in EP. Suffixes are shown to be incorporated into their base's prosodic word, while monosyllabic prefixes are adjoined to the word, yielding a recursive structure, where one prosodic word is embedded in a higher-order prosodic word, e.g. (RE(ORGANIZAR)w)w 'to reorganize' (similar to Peperkamp's proposal for Spanish and Italian productive monosyllabic prefixes). This prosodic distinction results from a morphological distinction: suffixes attach to stems while prefixes attach to words (or themes). The same adjunction is argued for in rightward cliticization; enclitics, on the other hand, are incorporated into their host's prosodic word, like suffixes. Contrary to the idea put forward in Brandão de Carvalho (1989) that EP tends towards leftward cliticization, Vigário takes phonological evidence to support the view that only pronominal clitics are enclitic in EP, while other functional words (definite articles, prepositions, complementizers) behave consistently as proclitics. The evidence for proclitic status of these functional words is the following: (i) the fact that they behave in a way distinct from enclitics in several phonological processes (for example, the definite article O does not semivocalize when preceded by a vowel, as happens with the enclitic pronoun O ('him'), e.g. Eu vi o *[iw] texto "I saw the text" vs. Eu vi-o [iw] deitado "I saw him lying" vs. (p. 186)); (ii) the fact that these words, contrary to clitic pronouns, may appear in intonational phrase initial position; (iii) the fact that these words may optionally receive intonational phrase prominence and pitch accent. Although enclitics are like suffixes incorporated into the preceding prosodic word, similar to what Peperkamp (1997) has proposed for Lucanian and Booij (1996) for Dutch, they present not exactly the same behavior as suffixes as already mentioned. This at first sight should deny the idea that EP enclitics bear the same prosodic structure as suffixes do. However, as was stated above, Vigário contends that this can be explained by the locus in the grammar where host + clitic sequences are obtained: the postlexical level. Enclitics do not undergo exactly the same processes as suffixes do, because the latter are added in the lexical level. The same contrast is argued to hold between prefixes and proclitics, although there are no lexical phonological phenomena which may support this. The fact that also postlexically adjunction happens at the left edge, while incorporation happens at the right, is explained by the idea that only the left edge of lexical prosodic words is visible when words are concatenated into the postlexical level. Since clitics are not prosodic words by themselves, they are incorporated into the prosodic word on the left (cliticization to the left depends on particular syntactic configurations too) or else adjoined to the right. Here, Vigário seems to adhere to a end-based mapping approach (Selkirk, 1986) while, in the first chapter, a relation-based mapping approach had been implicitly adopted. In Chapter 6 the issue of the prosodization of compound words is investigated. Vigário discusses if this prosodization should be distinct from regular p-phrases. Taking into account, besides regular morphological and syntactic compounds, a series of words not generally considered as compounds, like derived words with the diminutive suffix -ZINHO and the adverbialyzing suffix - MENTE, abbreviations, letter names, mesoclitic constructions, etc.- she shows that there is particular behavior that may point to a special prosodic constituent for compounds. Evidences presented are the following: segmental deletion rules, like non-back vowel deletion (e.g. doce[0] água "sweet water") and optional back vowel deletion (eg. salto[0] alto... "high heels") tend to be blocked in compounds (e.g. onze avos "eleventh", porta- óculos "glasses holder"). Moreover, focal stress may only occur in the rightmost prosodic word of compound words, while it may occur on any of the prosodic words that constitute a p-phrase. Thus, a compound prosodic word, a prosodic word that dominates two constituents of the same type is argued for. I think that the idea for such a particular structure should not be rejected a priori. However, it seems to me that there is not sufficient empirical justification for it since the phenomena adduced as evidence are too malleable. We are in need of more research about phrasal processes that may highlight the issue. Chapter 7 focuses on the characteristic reductions of clitics, which are not generalizable to other unstressed syllables. Data collected in experimental conditions are reported. The author concludes that the idiosyncratic reductions of consonant-schwa clitics (preposition 'de', complementizers and pronouns) and other non-schwa clitics (like the prepositions EM in', COM 'with', PARA 'for', and others) should be ascribed to the existence of lexically stored reduced allomorphs. Non-reduced allomorphs, on the other side, may also be affected by general reduction processes, which explains some gradient effects that have been found in the analyzed data. Since this chapter must be related to chapters 4 and 5, where clitics have been discussed, it seems out of place here. Chapter 8 is an excellent conclusion, summarizing the contents of the book as a whole, underlining the results achieved, pointing to and discussing alternative analyses, and raising questions of theoretical relevance and empirical questions for future research. Overall, this book constitutes a careful investigation of the prosodic phonology of the level of the word in EP. It provides a lot of empirical data, and some of the results are very interesting. The data are accounted for in terms of distinct prosodizations within the domain of the prosodic word allied with the lexical/postlexical distinction, which seems to capture most of the data. As regards the proposal of a compound prosodic word, I think it should have been motivated with more substantive evidence, since, in practice, it adds a new kind of constituent to the prosodic hierarchy. Except for some minor details that were not completely clear to me, the issues are clearly presented and thoroughly discussed. Therefore, this work will be of use for everybody interested not only in the phonology of EP, but also in phonological theory concerning Prosodic Phonology.
References
BOOIJ, G.(1988) On the relation between lexical and prosodic phonology. In: BERTINETTO, P. M. And LOPORCARO, M. (eds.) Certamen Phonologicum. Torino: Rosemberg and Sellier. p.63-76. BOOIJ, G. (1996) Cliticization as prosodic integration: The case of Dutch. The Linguistic Review, n.13.p. 219-242 BRANDÃO de CARVALHO, J. (1989) Phonological conditions on Portuguese clitic placement: on syntactic evidence for stress and rhytmical patterns. Linguistics. n. 27. p. 405- 436. HAYES, B. (1989) The prosodic hierarchy in meter. In: KIPARSKY, P. and YOUMANS, G. (eds.) Rhythm and Meter. Phonetics and Phonology I. New York: Academic Press. p.201-260. HAYES,B. (1990) Precompiled phrasal phonology. In: INKELAS, S. and ZEC, D. (eds.) The Phonology-Syntax Connection. Chicago: Chicago University Press. p. 85-108. NESPOR, M. and VOGEL, I. (1986) Prosodic Phonology. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris. PEPERKAMP, S. (1997) Prosodic words. HIL Dissertations 34. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics. SERKIRK, E. (1984) Phonology and Syntax. The Relation between Sound and Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. SELKIRK, E (1986) On derived domains in sentence phonology. Phonology Yearbook, n. 3. p. 271-405. SELKIRK, E.(1995)The prosodic structure of function words.In:BECKMAN,J., DICKEY, L. W. and URBANCZYK, S. (eds.) Papers in Optimality Theory. University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers, n. 18. Amherst, MA: GLSA. p. 439-469. ZWICKY, A. (1987) Suprressing the Z's. Journal of Linguistics. v.23, n.1. p.133-148.
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER Gisela Collischonn is Adjunct Professor at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where she teaches phonology and morphology.
