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Morphological Complexity within and across Boundaries: In honour of Aslı Göksel
Edited by Aslı Gürer, Dilek Uygun-Gökmen and Balkız Öztürk
[Studies in Language Companion Series 215] 2020
► pp. 285–312

Morphosyntax-prosody mismatches in Karachay-Balkar

An analysis of narrow focus constructions

| İstanbul Bilgi University
| Marmara University

This study aims to account for prosodic phrasing and morphosyntax-prosody mismatches in Karachay-Balkar narrow focus constructions. Firstly, based on the analyses of the pitch tracks of utterances we demonstrate how narrow focus shapes prosodic structure and yields mismatches with morphosyntactic structure. Then, in line with Truckenbrodt (1995), we suggest that the driving force for the so-called mismatches is the requirement for focus to be the most prominent constituent in its domain. We propose a top-down model according to which the focus aligns with the right edge of the intonational phrase and inserts a phonological phrase boundary to its left. The proposed focus driven prosodic phrasing can also account for prosodic structuring in polar questions with the question suffix.

Keywords: prosody, morphosyntax, Karachay-Balkar, focus, polar questions, question suffix
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Mapping between prosodic structure and syntactic structure
  • 3.Prosody of Karachay-Balkar
    • 3.1Broad focus constructions
    • 3.2Narrow focus constructions
  • 4.Deriving prosodic phrasing in Karachay-Balkar
    • 4.1Prosodic phrasing at sentence level constructions
    • 4.2Prosodic phrasing in narrow focus constructions with the question suffix
      • 4.2.1The distribution of question suffix and focus in polar questions
      • 4.2.2Prosodic phrasing with the question suffix
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.215.11gur
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