The prosodic phrasing of sentential objects

This paper shows a clear effect of the syntactic complementizer phrase (CP) projection on the shape of the prosodic phrasing in Catalan SVO structures and proposes an analysis in the framework of stochastic Optimality Theory. Based on data from two production experiments, it is shown that sentential objects, i.e. CP objects, lead to a great variation in prosodic groupings and to a high percentage of matrix (SV) groupings. Most importantly, the effect on S and V is independent of the actual prosodic weight of the CP, which contrasts with previous findings on DP objects. Experiment 1 reveals the effect for prosodically heavy CP objects (consisting of at least three ω). Experiment 2 exposes the appearance of the same effect with CPs consisting of only one ω, unlike prosodically light DP objects. To account for the findings, the constraint Align-CP,L is introduced, which aligns the left edge of a CP with the left edge of a prosodic phrase; this captures the fact that the sentential object is in general prosodically separated from the subject and the verb. This constraint overlaps with further eurhythmic and syntactic constraints to guarantee a reverse ranking in order to account for the variation found in the data.