Prosody–Syntax Interaction in the Expression of Focus

Constraints on prosodic and syntactic well-formedness conflict with each other. This is particularly evident in the expression of new information focus, where the best prosodic position for main stress does not necessarily match the best syntactic position for the constituent being focused. Since focus must be stressed, either stress or the focused constituent must abandon their best position, violating either the syntactic or the prosodic constraints responsible for it. This paper argues for an optimality theoretic analysis of this conflict, showing how different focus paradigms reflect different rankings of the relevant syntactic and prosodic constraints. As we will see, only an optimality analysis can account for the paradigm of Italian focus while maintaining the kind of prosodic theory of main stress emerged from prosodic studies in the last two decades. Furthermore, the analysis extends naturally to focus paradigms in English, French, and Chichewa with no need for language-specific parametric devices. The conflicting nature of prosodic and syntactic constraints determines a complex crosslinguistic typology from a single set of universal constraints with interface conditions kept to an absolute minimum.