b. Phonology (one possibility):
[IntpSesame St. is a production of] [IntPthe Children's Television Workshop]
c. Phonology (another possibility):
[IntPSesame St.] [IntPis a production] [IntPof the Children's Television Workshop]For another case, (17) repeats the well-known example cited in section 2.3, whose intonation Chomsky attributed to
“performance.”^54
(17) a.Syntax:
[NPthis] [vpis [NPthe cat [CPthat [vpcaught [Npthe rat [cpthat [vpstole [NPthe cheese]]]]]]]]
b. Phonology:
[IntPthis is the cat] [lntPthat caught the rat] [IntPthat stole the cheese]But (17b) is not a performance error, it is exactly the ideal intonation for this sentence.
The right approach to these correspondences sees Intonational Phrases as phonological units that on one hand
constrain the domains of syllabification, stress, and intonation, and that on the other bear a loose relation to syntax
(Gee and Grosjean 1983, Selkirk 1984, Jackendoff 1987, Hirst 1993, Truckenbrodt 1999. The formation rules for
IntPs can be stipulated approximately as (18).^55
(18) a.An utterance consists of a series of one or more concatenated IntPs forming aflat structure. Each IntP is a
sequence of Words.
b. Preferably, the IntPs are of equal length.
c. Preferably, the longest IntP is at the end.
d. (Possibly, some strong preferences on maximum duration of IntPs, e.g. try not to go over three seconds)A basic interface constraint relates IntPs to syntactic structure. It can be stated informally as (19a) and slightly more
formally as (19b).
(19) a.An IntP corresponds to all of a syntactic constituent C, except that a subconstituent at the right-hand end of
C can be omitted.THE PARALLEL ARCHITECTURE 119
(^54) For non-linguists: CP in (17a) stands for“complementizer phrase,”a now-standard ter min linguistic theory for subordinate clauses; the ter m“complementizer”is roughly
what traditional grammar calls a subordinating conjunction.
(^55) Connoisseurs will again recognize that I have oversimplified, omitting e.g. details of inter-mediate-sized groupings of morphophonological words such as Phonological
Phrase (Selkirk 1984; Nespor and Vogel 1986).