Introducing Syntax

CHAPTER OUTLINE

In the previous chapter, we showed how morphology provides concrete, pronounceable forms for the abstract feature bundles that syntax merges. Once the grammar knows which morpho-phonological forms to use, it starts to care about how exactly to pronounce them. In this chapter, we will not concern ourselves with the actual way these morpho-phonological words are realised acoustically. The reason is that there is simply no connection with syntax here. The concept CAT in English is pronounced as K-A-T (or in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /khæt/), the pronoun he is pronounced as H-E or /hi:/. This is in no way related to the syntactic structure, and therefore of no interest to a syntactician. There is one aspect of sound, however, that a syntactician should care about, and which therefore deserves a closer look. It concerns the fact that the morpho-phonological forms that morphology has provided (i.e. the words of the sentence) have to be pronounced in a particular order (call it the word order). This order is not random but obeys certain rules. This raises the question of how to formulate those rules. It turns out that we run into a bit of a paradox here. On the one hand, it seems clear that the word orders we end up with are not entirely independent of the structures created by syntax. On the other hand, these word orders are not fully determined by the syntactic hierarchy either. After all, a hierarchy is not a linear order. This means that, in order to understand how linearisation works, we have to study the relation between syntax and phonology carefully. Which part of word order is due to syntax, and which is due to phonology? This is the topic of this chapter.