Kim, Miran. 2015. Focus-driven prosodic restructuring patterns: A unified OT account of deaccenting and dephrasing. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 21.1. 25-56.
Sentence-level accent redistribution and prosodic rephrasing are often required when focus is involved. This paper investigates deaccenting in English and dephrasing in Korean, providing a unified account for these two types of restructuring patterns that have previously been handled separately within the OT framework. The main proposal in this paper is that both of these restructuring patterns are motivated by high-ranked EDGEMOST (LEFTMOST/ RIGHTMOST) constraints, which refer to the manifestation of prominence and syntactic/prosodic boundaries. The new analysis has two advantages over previous studies such as Truckenbrodt (1995) and Selkirk (2000). Theoretically, it solves the input specification problem in the analysis of Selkirk (2000) for English focus phrasing variation. Typologically, it removes an unnecessary parametric difference between English and Korean in describing focus restructuring patterns. Within the new proposal, English and Korean share the RIGHTMOST preference, which can be supported by the perceptual nature of pitch prominence. (Korea University)
Keywords: focus, prosodic restructuring, deaccenting, dephrasing, alignment constraints, EDGEMOST (LEFTMOST/RIGHTMOST) constraints, Optimality Theory