UC Santa Cruz

The construct state (CS) provides a rich opportunity to explore the syntax-prosody interface in Modern Hebrew because it is morphologically uniform but syntactically, semantically, and prosodically diverse. Research on the syntax-prosody interface in Hebrew has been fairly limited, while the construct state has been frequently studied in the expression of genitive relations, the syntactic structuring of DPs, compounding, and beyond (Berman 1988, 2020, Borer 1996, 1998, Siloni 1996, 1997, and others). However, previous studies of CS prosody have conventionally assumed that all construct states map to single prosodic words (Siloni 2001, Faust 2014). Looking specifically at CS nominals, I argue that they are prosodically heterogenous in ways that reflect their underlying syntactic structure and provide insight into interactions between syntax and prosody. I also consider the prosodic status of CS nominals in contrast with free state (FS) nominals, which are analytic genitive constructions where nouns unambiguously map to separate prosodic words. The analysis presented here relies on Borer’s (2012) tripartite division of CS nominals into compounds, M-constructs, and R-constructs. Borer argues that CS nominals are not syntactically uniform based on various syntactic and semantic diagnostics. I identify three types of prosodic structures for CS nominals that parallel Borer ’s typology: minimal prosodic words [ ft ft . . . ]ω (Ito & Mester 2009), coordinative prosodic words [ω ω ]ω (Ito & Mester 2013), and phi-phrases (ω ω ... )φ. These structures are motivated using phonological diagnostics including stress assignment, resyllabification, and antepretonic /e/-deletion (Bolozky & Schwarzwald 1990). I also propose that the mapping from syntax to prosodic structure in CS nominals can be captured with Match Theory (Selkirk 2011), as long as constraints requiring syntax-to-prosody matching are ranked highly to show a more direct effect of syntax on prosody. By examining the predictions of Match Theory, I further consider how prosody may inform syntactic analyses of the construct state and free state. I conclude that a more fine-grained view of CS prosody provides a better understanding of the construct state and syntax-prosody interactions.