Prosody as Morphology - Cornell University



The Morphological Functions of Prosody in Chinese

Shengli Feng

Harvard University

In the study of interface between prosodic and other linguistic components, there has been an attempted to establish what is now known as Prosodic Syntax, under which intriguing evidence has been accumulated in the past decades. Based on previous discoveries, this paper attempts to show that prosody may function like morphology. The morphological function of prosody can be realized through different types of super-segmental phenomena, such as: (a) tone, (b) stress, (c) prosodic templates and (d) the phrasal prosody (Nuclear Stress Rule) that determines certain syntactic structures. It is further shown that the prosodic features outlined above could function, to certain extents, as a (super-segmental) morpheme that changes the grammatical functions of a given linguistic form in the language, examples including:

i. Compounds that are formed according to the size of a Prosodic-Word;

fu-ze

carry-responsibility

`be responsible for, be in charge of’

dan-xin

carry heart

`worry’

ii. Length is used for dividing grammatical categories between phrases and words:

Ta fu-ze baowei gongzuo

he carry-responsibility security affairs

`He is in charge of security affairs.’

*Ta fu-zeren baowei gongzuo

he carry-responsibility security affair

`He is in charge of security affairs.’

iii. Disyllabic template is a necessary condition for verbs to become a gerund;

bian jiaocai jiaocai de *bian

compile textbook textbook’s compiling

bianxie jiaocai jiaocai de bianxie

compile textbook textbook’s compiling

iv. Nuclear Stress triggers syntactic operations in certain prosodic-syntactic environments;

v. etc…

Finally it demonstrates that if prosody functions like morphology, it will be interesting to see how and to what extend prosody could affect, like a functional category，the grammatical organizations of human languages. (nels39@cornell.edu)

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