Competing syntactic and phonological constraints in Hebrew prosodic phrasing

This study brings empirical data from Hebrew to support Selkirk's claim that prosodic phrasing is the result of an interaction of syntactic and phonological constraints. Employing a recently devised protocol, a production experiment elicited contextually disambiguated utterances of the relative clause attachment ambiguity construction. Satisfying the syntactic alignment constraint (AlignRXP) and the phonological length constraints (BinMin and BinMax) would result in different prosodic phrasings for this syntactically ambiguous construction, permitting a test of the ranking of these constraints. Two types of data analysis suggest that in Hebrew the syntactic and phonological constraints are strictly ranked: In a context where the two types of constraints are in conflict, the alignment constraint is dominant; when the alignment constraint is vacuously satisfied, effects of the lower-ranked length constraints come into play. Together, these experimental findings illustrate the descriptive value of the constraint ranking hypothesis for prosodic phrasing.