Festschrifts

Current OT analyses of prosodic phrasing are unable to capture Chichewa’s prosody which under specific focus contexts appears to allow for multiple instances of prosodic culmination within a single prosodic phrase. As this paper shows, rather than providing a counter example to the universal validity of current prosodic constraints, Chichewa’s lack of culmination follows from them once Truckenbrodt’s StressXP constraint is generalized to intonational and utterance phrases. The same quest for universal validity also imposes a finer tuning of head-alignment constraints, which must become sensitive to the distinction between realized and unrealized head positions, and a weaker condition on the prosodic prominence of focus, which need only match the highest prominence available among the constituents in the focus domain rather than exceed it as currently maintained.