Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating the role of prosody on word order

Prosody, the aspect of language that relates to sentence melody and phrasing, is used to express sentence meaning and reflect sentence structure. For example, the difference between the sentences “We understand, Bill” and “We understand Bill” is whether there is a pause before “Bill” or not, and this reflects the sentence structure. In the pronunciation with a pause, Bill is the person being addressed, and in the pronunciation without the pause, Bill is the object of the verb “understand.” While it is generally accepted that sentence structure can affect prosody in this way, it has also been claimed that prosody might affect sentence structure, in particular word order. This dissertation project seeks to investigate the effect of prosody on word order through a series of production and perception experiments, in order to advance the understanding of how different components of grammar can interact with each other. In addition to training a graduate student, a deeper understanding of the role of prosody in language also has the potential to contribute to advances in automated speech recognition and synthesis—i.e., it can help us train AI to better “understand” and “produce” language. This dissertation project consists of four experiments designed to probe the syntax-prosody interface. It addresses a fundamental debate in linguistics about the influence of prosody on word order, and tests the hypothesis that prosody can affect word order. The research centers around constructions with second position clitics, whose linear position appears to be sensitive to syntactic and prosodic constraints. If this is confirmed by the results of the experiments, it would provide novel evidence in favor of a theory which allows prosody to influence linear order, and reject theories that argue that word order is determined by the syntax alone. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.