Un-Wrap-ing prosodic phrasing in Chichewa

Previous work on Chichewa has argued, based on relatively simple sentences, that Phonological Phrases align with XP edges and that lexical XPs must be parsed into a single Phonological Phrase, unless they contain a focused element. In this study, we test previous analyses on more complex sentences: those containing relative clauses and other nominal modifiers, as well as adverbial modifiers. This data leads us to make a new generalization about Chichewa phrasing, namely that Phonological Phrases right-align with syntactic phases, vP or CP. The phrasing of nominal modifiers is best explained by proposing that they have inherent focus.