Barrie on prosody of Altaic nominal structures

Prosodic Aspects of Nominal Structure in Altaic

This talk will cover prosodic aspects of case marking on objects in Uzbek and Mongolian (including joint work with Jungu Kang), and in Korean (including joint work with Heeryun Chung). We observe that objects marked with accusative case form their own phonological phrase, while caseless objects are phrased together with the object. We show that these facts cannot be handled within an approach to the syntax-prosody interface that prunes phonologically null structure from the tree before assigning prosodic structure, but must take phasal structure into account regardless of whether the phase head is overtly expressed or not. We adopt the KP structure of case-marked nouns and assume that KP is a phase rather than DP (adapting Svenonius, 2004). We argue that non-specific objects lack a KP layer, while specific but caseless objects have a full KP structure with a null K head. Despite the fact that caseless specific objects and caseless non-specific objects have the same segmental material, we show that they behave differently in terms of their prosodic structure. We propose that as a phase, KP forms its own phonological phrase. The non-specific caseless object does not project a KP, so forms a phonological phrase with the verb. We present an analysis couched in Match Theory (Selkirk 2009, 2011), Phasal Match Theory (Weber 2021) both updated to account for PF interface effects (Lee and Selkirk, 2022).