AN OVERVIEW OF THEORIES OF THE SYNTAX-PHONOLOGY INTERFACE∗1 Gorka Elordieta UPV/EHU Abstract This article is intended as a critical survey of the phonological theories of the syntax- phonology interface. These theories can be divided into two main groups, according to the role they attribute to syntactic representations in creating phonological domains. On the one hand there is the Direct Reference Theory, which claims that phonological operations are directly sensitive to syntactic information, in terms of relations of c-command or m- command (i.e., government) holding between the elements participating in phonological processes. On the other, there is the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory of Prosodic Phonology, which defends the view that syntactic and phonological representations are not isomorphic and that there is a distinct level of representation called Prosodic Structure which contains a hierarchically organized set of prosodic constituents. These constituents are built from syntactic structure by a finite set of parameterized algorithms, and phonological processes refer to prosodic constituents rather than to syntactic constituents. Elordieta (1997, 1999) proposes that certain phonological phenomena may be specified to apply in the domains or constituents formed by functional and lexical heads related by feature checking. Seidl’s (2001) Minimal Indirect Reference Theory claims that syntactic relationships such as theta-domains determine phonological constituency at the phrasal level. Another impor- tant, more recent view is the one that maintains that spellout domains (that is, all the material included in a syntactic phase except for the head of the phase and elements in the specifier of that phase) are interpreted as phonological constituents in PF. 1. Introduction The objective of this chapter is to provide a survey and critical review of the pho- nological theories that deal with phenomena whose domains of application are di- rectly or indirectly determined by syntactic structure. These theories can be divided into two main groups, according to the role they attribute to syntactic representa- * This article is an extended version of Elordieta (2007). I remain very grateful to Aritz Irurtzun, Gillian Ramchand and Charles Reiss for helpful comments on different versions of that article. I am also permanently indebted to Jean-Roger Vergnaud for sharing so many ideas, some of them expressed in section 5. Last but not least, thanks are also due to Joseba Lakarra for his editorial work and patience. Partial funding for this work came from the financial assistance granted by the Basque Government to the research group HiTT (GIC07/144-IT-210-07 and HM-2008-1-10). [ASJU, XLII-1, 2008, 209-286] 210 GORKA ELORDIETA tions in creating phonological domains. On the one hand there is the Direct Refer- ence Theory, which claims that phonological operations are directly sensitive to syn- tactic information, in terms of relations of c-command or m-command (i.e., government) holding between the elements participating in phonological processes (cf. Manzini 1983, Kaisse 1985, Rizzi and Savoia 1993). On the other, there is the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory, which defends the view that syntactic and phonological representations are not isomorphic and that there is a distinct level of representation called Prosodic Structure which mediates between the syntactic and phonological components. This level contains a hierarchically organized set of prosodic constitu- ents, built from syntactic structure by a finite set of parameterized algorithms of pro- sodic constituent formation. Phonological operations themselves do not refer to syn- tactic constituents, but to the already created prosodic constituents. Two main approaches have developed from this view: the End-Based approach (cf. Chen 1987, Selkirk 1986) and the Relation-Based Approach (cf. Nespor and Vogel 1982, 1986, Hayes 1989). In another section of this article, I will present data from a dialect of Basque that constitutes a serious challenge to all these theories of the syntax-phonology interface. The problem lies in the behaviour of functional categories in Vowel Assimilation in Lekeitio Basque, in the sense that not all functional categories pattern the same way with regard to this phenomenon. The theories of the syntax-phonology interface proposed in the literature (whether they defend a direct or an indirect mapping from syntax) fail to capture the nature of such differences. Elordieta (1997) shows that this is a problem that can be found in other phenomena from other languages, such as French liaison, Irish Initial Consonant Mutation or ATR Harmony in Ìgbo, and ar- gues that the differences in behaviour with respect to a given phenomenon among functional categories are determined by their different syntactic relationships with the lexical heads they are linearly adjacent to. Certain phonological phenomena may be specified to apply in the domains or constituents formed by functional and lexical heads related by feature checking. For reasons of limit of space, in this article only the data and analysis of Vowel Assimilation in Lekeitio Basque will be presented. There are other more recent developments of these two general views of the syntax- phonology interface. On the side advocating for a direct mapping between syntax and phonology, there have been proposals building on the minimalist notion of a phase (cf. Chomsky 2001a) which claim that phases delimit phonological domains or constitu- ents. Seidl’s (2001) Minimal Indirect Reference Theory is one proposal along these lines. This theory also claims that other syntactic relationships such as theta-domains or domains where theta-roles are assigned determine phonological constituency at the phrasal level. Another important, more recent view is the one that maintains that spell- out domains (that is, all the material included in a syntactic phase except for the head of the phase and elements in the specifier of that phase) are interpreted as phonological constituents in PF (see, inter alia, Dobashy 2003, Ishihara 2003, 2007, Kahnemuy- ipour 2004, Kratzer and Selkirk 2007, Pak 2007, 2008, who present some differences in assumptions and implementations). On the side of the position advocating for an indirect mapping between syntactic and phonological constituents, the most notewor- thy recent contribution has been Truckenbrodt’s (1995, 1999) development of the End-Based Approach of the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory within the framework of Opti- AN OVERVIEW OF THEORIES OF THE SYNTAX-PHONOLOGY INTERFACE 211 mality Theory. We will review all these proposals as well, after a presentation of the more classic models. Finally, Hayes’s (1990) theory of Precompiled Phrasal Phonology tries to explain all phenomena of phrasal phonology that cannot be accounted for in terms of the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory in terms of allomorphic rules of phrasal pho- nology stored in the lexicon. According to this proposal, all phonological phenomena that apply in specific syntactic environments should be treated equally with phenom- ena that apply to specific morphemes or syntactic categories, such as the a/an alterna- tion of the English indefinite determiner. The article is structured as follows: sections 2-7 contain a critical overview of the most relevant theoretical approaches to phrasal and prosodic phonology, and sec- tion 8 contains a conclusion. 2. The Direct Reference Theory At the outset of our review, it is necessary to clarify a confusing claim about the Direct Reference Theory (DRT henceforth). It is often reported in overviews of pro- sodic phonology that the basic postulate of DRT is the isomorphism between syntac- tic structure and phonological structure at the phrasal level. That is, that syntactic constituents are directly mapped into phonological constituents, in such a way that nominal phrases, verbal phrases, prepositional phrases and so forth would be trans- formed into phonological phrases where phonological processes may apply. The mapping operations would be as straightforward as the ones illustrated in (1) (where Ф is the label for a phonological phrase): (1) a. NP Ф It is important to note that there have been no proponents of such a theory, at least not among the proponents of DRT.12Another false contention is that the first version of the DRT appears in the founding work of generative phonology, Chom- sky and Halle (1968), and in Elisabeth Selkirk’s (1972) pioneering work on the phrase phonology of English and French. We will briefly review the basic assump- tions on the relationship between the syntactic and phonological components ex- pressed in the early stages of generative phonology, which we will call the Boundary Theory. 2.1. The Boundary Theory 2.1.1. Chomsky and Halle (1968) In SPE it was suggested that the syntactic component assigned to each sentence a “surface structure” that the phonological component had direct access to, deter- mining the phonetic form of the sentence. It was claimed that at surface structure 1 As we will see later, this mapping algorithm is closer to what some versions of the Prosodic Hier- archy Theory defend, as ironic as it may sound. 212 GORKA ELORDIETA words were separated by boundaries, as the result of the general convention formu- lated in (2): (2) The boundary # is automatically inserted at the beginning and end of every string dominated by a major category, i.e., by one of the lexical categories “noun,” “verb,” “adjective,” or by a category such as “sentence,” “noun phrase,” “verb phrase,” which dominates a lexical category. (Chomsky and Halle 1968: 366) By this convention, a # is inserted at the left and right edges of every lexical ter- minal element as well as its maximal projection. Non-lexical categories are exempt from bracket insertion. Thus, the sentence in (3) would have the surface structure in (4) (cf. Chomsky and Halle 1968: 367-8): (3) The book was in an unlikely place (4) [S # [NP # [D the]D [N # book #]N #]NP [VP # was [PP # [P in]P [NP # [D an]D [A # un [A # likely #]A #]A [N # place #]N #]NP #]PP #]VP #]S It is subsequently claimed that a word is a constituent of the form [# W #], that is, a constituent surrounded by left and right # boundaries and category labelling brack- ets.