Phonological movement in Greek, Latin, Russian, and Ukrainian 
(Seminars)
21 March 2012
12noon - 1pm
Venue: DALSL Meeting Room 206-408, Arts 1
Contact info: Jason Brown
Contact email: jason.brown@auckland.ac.nz
Applied Language Studies and Linguistics seminar by Chris Golston, California State University, Fresno.
A basic assumption in grammar is that all movement is syntactic. This paper shows that fronting in Ancient Greek and Latin, and in modern spoken Russian and Ukrainian involves movement of prosodic constituents to prosodic edges, ie movement that occurs outside of the syntactic realm entirely.
We are led to this conclusion by four major observations about fronting in these languages:
(i) it moves prosodic constituents, prosodic words and phonological phrases;
(ii) it does not move syntactic constituents unless they constitute prosodic constituents;
(iii) it respects a prosodic constraint, the OCP;
(iv) and it ignores syntactic constraints like the coordinate structure constraint and the left-branch condition.
We propose that this is just what we should expect with movement that is entirely prosodic: fine-grained sensitivity to prosodic constituency and prosodic constraints and complete insensitivity to syntactic constituents and syntactic constraints.
All welcome.
