Abstract Underlying Representations in Prosodic Structure
Abstract Underlying Representations in Prosodic Structure
One of the central ways in which the long-standing debate between rationalists and empiricists surfaces in linguistics involves the putative existence of abstract phonological representations underlying seemingly more concrete surface forms. Linguists ranging from Panini to Chomsky and Halle have employed highly abstract representations, whereas the relatively recent rise of statistical and parallelist conceptions of language and cognition has led others to more surface-oriented views of phonology. In this chapter we review psycholinguistic and phonological evidence on both sides of the abstractness question in the domain of prosodic structure, with a focus on Abkhaz stress assignment and the representation of lexical prosody in Optimality Theory. We conclude that the weight of the evidence supports the existence of abstract underlying prosodic structure, even when it is predictable.
Keywords: phonology, abstractness, psycholinguistics, prosody, underlying representations, syllable, mora
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