Syntax interacts with prosody: the VOS order in Greek

The examination of the prosodic aspect of word order phenomena so far has been limited to theories about the location of nuclear stress and the effect the latter has on the realization of focus (e.g. Zubizarreta, M.-L., 1998. Prosody, Focus and Word Order. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). This work has not been carried out for Greek. As far as Greek is concerned, a number of studies have been done on rhythm and intonation [e.g. Arvaniti, A., 1994. Accoustic features of Greek rhythmic structure. J Phon 22, 239; Botinis, A., 1998. Intonation in Greek. In: Hirst, D., Di Cristo, A. (Eds.), Intonation Systems. A Survey of Twenty Languages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 288–310], but these have been conducted independently of syntax. Therefore, what remains unexplored is a prosodic analysis of an utterance on an experimental basis and in relation to its syntactic properties, since these two components interact. The present research is both theoretical and experimental in nature, since it is based both on the intuition of the linguist and on an amount of speech data. In particular, a number of adult male and female native speakers of Greek were recorded. The subjects uttered sentences with the VOS order and answered questions which had been constructed so as to elicit subject focus. An intonation pattern was derived from a measured pitch track and, taking the phenomenon of perceptual equivalence into account, we looked into the ways sentences with a VOS order are realized in terms of prosody. More specifically, the results of this study show the following: First, in the VOS order, it is some constituent other than the subject that is most frequently focused and second, in narrow focus questions (subject focusing), the preferred orders are SVO and OclVS.