The Syntax and Prosody of DOM and PNI in Mongolian

초록

We examine the behavior of bare nouns in differential object marking and pseudo noun incorporation environments in Mongolian. Unmarked bare nouns and pseudo incorporated nouns have the same segmental structure; however, we show that they differ in their prosody. The prosodic word in Mongolian has a characteristic LH contour. This contour is found on unmarked bare nouns which are not pseudo incorporated; however the pseudo incorporated noun lacks this contour. Guntsetseg (2016) identifies various syntactic differences, which we use to provide a structural analysis of nominals. Specifically, the pseudo incorporated noun is a bare nP and non-pseudo incorporated nouns are full KPs, regardless of whether they are case marked or not. We propose an analysis in a modified version of Match Theory in which phases map to prosodic categories. Specifically for Mongolian the KP phase and the nP phase both map to a phonological word. Thus, a full KP contains two recursive phonological words, while a nP (a pseudo incorporated noun) contains only a single phonological word. We propose that only non-minimal phonological words bear a LH contour. Thus, only a full KP will appear with this contour.

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