Organized by : Languages, Dialects and Isoglosses of Anatolia, the Caucasus and Iran (Labex EFL - INALCO)

Abstract : 

This paper provides novel evidence in favor of flexible mapping between an Intonational Phrase (ι) and syntactic constituents. In the existing accounts, ι is assumed to map onto a syntactic clause, but a ‘clause’ in the syntax-prosody literature may be defined as a TP (Zerbian 2006), CP (Truckenbrodt 2005, Henderson 2012), or the complement of Force0 and C0 (Selkirk 2011). Hamlaoui & Szendrői (2015, 2017) propose that ι is flexible and corresponds to the highest projection that hosts verbal material, together with its specifier (HVP), and, therefore, provide a unified, syntax-based account of cross-linguistic variation in ι-size. A prediction that it makes is that ι-size is also determined by HVP in a language where the height of the verb depends on utterance type. Iron Ossetic (East Iranian), with several projections available for…