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<Paper uid="E91-1014">
  <Title>WHAT SORT OF TREES DO WE SPEAK? A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF THE SYNTAX-PROSODY INTERFACE IN TOKYO JAPANESE</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In explorations of the relationship between syntax, phonology and phonetics, it is now generally agreed that hierarchical prosodic representations are an important organising concept. As Pierrehumbert and Beckman (P&amp;B, 1988), vividly put it 'We speak trees, not strings'. One influential view of the geometry of ~ree representations is Selkirk's (1981) Strict Layer Hypothesis. For Selkirk and others, prosodic structures and syntactic structures are objects of different kinds. Yet the nature of the mapping between them remains a question to which explicit, accurate and declarative answers have still to be formulated.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This paper presents an alternative view in which phonetic constraints are incrementally associated directly with syntactic derivations. More exactly, derivations must simultaneously meet the well-formedness conditions on syntactic and prosodic labelling, thereby guaranteeing the declarative nature of the syntax-prosody interface. In turn, prosodic labels are associated with a set of equational constraints on phonetic objects. The theory is illustrated with a treatment of prosodic phrasing and tone scaling in standard, i.e. Tokyo, Japanese.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The possibility of equating syntactic and prosodic structure in this way follows from a view of syntax with two characteristics. First, some commonly assumed syntactic constituents which never correspond to prosodic units are insufficiently motivated, so such constructions are given an alternative syntactic analysis which respects prosodic constituency. Secondly, the derivation of an expression with a given semantic interpretation, and hence its prosodic structure, may be systematically under-determined by that interpretation. Syntactic structure is thus at least partly motivated by prosodic data, in accord with the concrete view of syntax presupposed in constraint-based grammars.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Conversely, the results of Kubozono's (1987) careful phonetic experiments point to the existence of prosodic structures that are organised recursively and in other ways incompatible with the Strict Layer Assumption. Distinctions in syntactic constituency which have been argued to be unimportant for prosodic phrasing do appear to have clear phonetic exponents under controlled conditions, weakening the argument for autonomous prosodic structures.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The paper is organised as follows. The elements of the syntactic model used in the analysis of Japanese are presented. We then approach the syntax-prosody interface from the opposite end, and look at the prosodic phonetics of Japanese utterances, trying to classify features of pitch contours. First, several relatively uncontroversial elements in the phonology of Japanese prosody are discussed - the minor phrase, the accentual and phrasal tones, declination and downstep. Then the Strict Layer Hypothesis and its application to minor phrasing and tone scaling are considered. Data from Kubozono (1987) is introduced to argue instead for the theory assumed here, and a preliminary treatment is presented.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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