Intonational phrasing: the case for recursive prosodic structure

The past decade has seen a good deal of research on the relation between phonology and syntax, and on the nature of the phonological structures – both intonational and metrical – on to which syntactic structure must be mapped (e.g. Liberman & Prince 1977; Pierrehumbert 1980; Selkirk 1984; Kaisse 1985; Nespor & Vogel 1986). While some of this work breaks genuinely new ground, in at least one respect it relies on a theoretical legacy from work going back at least half a century: the INTONATIONAL PHRASE (IP). The goal of this paper is to examine the properties of the IP as a theoretical construct and to propose a substantially modified approach to intonational phrasing.