German sentence accents and embedded prosodic phrases

This paper proposes a new approach to German sentence accent assignment and intonational patterns using embedded prosodic domains. The concept of embeddedness is restricted to prosodic domains embedding and differs from Cinqueʹs (1993) syntactic embeddedness. It is shown that both syntax and prosody play a role in sentence accents. Prosodic domains are projected from syntax, and every syntactic maximal projection is mapped into its own domain. However, some peculiarities of sentence accents are better accounted for in terms of prosodic structure itself. I propose extending the phenomenon called ‘integration’, which up to now has been exclusively applied to a sequence of argument and predicate: the head of a phrase can be at the same time the head of a larger phrase containing it. In this new account, integration is a prosodic phenomenon and it applies to a larger set of cases than assumed so far. It is shown that an OT account making use of a few well-motivated constraints can explain the default (unmarked) accent pattern, as well as a large number of more complicated data.