Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution

5.4 Syntax and phonology

The next thing to notice about the structure in (1) and the rule syste min Fig. 5.3 is how little they have to do with
syntax. The units of syllabic and metrical structure—things like codas and beats—bear no relation at all to syntactic
categories. Only the morphophonology has constituents that map cleanly into constituents of the syntactic tree. And
even the types of units here—Words and Clitics—are not the same as the syntactic categories Noun, Verb, and so
forth. For instance,theandeveryare both Determiners, buttheis a Clitic andeveryis a Word. Moreover, a Clitic can
attach in morphophonology to a Word to which it bears no syntactic relation. This can be seen in (14), where the
mismatches are boldfaced.

(14)

Morphophonology:

[wd[cla] very][wdold][wdman[cl 's]][wdhere]

Syntax:

[Np[Deta][AP[Advvery][Aold]][Nman]][VP[V's][PPhere]

However, even if constituent structure is not preserved, what is preserved is the linear order of morphophonological
and syntactic units. That is, we can state the general correspondence as rule (15).^53

(15)

Morphophonology: ...ξ 1 ξ 2 ...

corresponds to

Syntax: ...x 1 x 2 ...

whereξicorresponds to xi

Turning to the scale of the whole sentence, the prosodic unit closest in size to syntactic phrases is the Intonational
Phrase (IntP), the part of the sentence that falls under an intonation contour. However, intonational contours do not
follow syntactic phrases at all precisely. Consider the sentence in (16). Its syntactic bracketing is (16a). It can be
pronounced in at least the two possible ways shown in (16b, c), with no appreciable difference in meaning. Note how
different all three bracketings are.

(16) a.Syntax:

[NPSesame St.] [VPis [NPa production [PPof [NPthe Children's Television Workshop]]]]

118 ARCHITECTURAL FOUNDATIONS

(^53) This may be actually justa very strongdefault.Thereare circumstances, forinstance,wherea cliticis in the“wrong”order forsyntacticgenerality. A possiblesolutionis that
what we see is the phonological ordering, but the syntactic ordering does not match. For one such case involving Serbo-Croatian, see Halpern (1995).