Constraints on syntax-prosody correspondence: The case of clausal and subclausal parentheticals in Turkish

This study investigates the syntax-prosody mapping of parentheticals. The results of a production experiment on Turkish demonstrate that the parentheticals bence 'for me' and yanılmıyorsam 'if I am not wrong' are parsed as identical to subclausal arguments, i.e. as phonological phrases when pre-nuclear and parts of phonological phrases when post-nuclear. These results are discussed with respect to a larger data set, in which the prosodic category types of phrasal and clausal parentheticals are compared. Taken together, the data show that parentheticals that are used to commit speech acts, regardless of whether they are clausal or not, are always parsed as intonational phrases, whereas, other parentheticals are parsed as phonological phrases. The paper concludes that illocutionary force projection is the only trigger for intonational phrase formation regardless of whether or not the input syntactic structure is parenthetical, clausal or subclausal.