Prosodic Structure and Phrasing of Function Words in English

This paper explores the possibilities of prosodifying function words in English. It is well known that function words can be manifested in their strong and weak forms as a function of accent and position in a sentence. It is also known that weak forms of function words, which are not phrase-final, have a clitic status in prosodic structure, while strong forms of function words in phrase-final position have the status of a prosodic word on their own (Inkelas and Zec 1993, Selkirk 1984, 1996). Thus, the prosodic phrasing of function words has been accounted for by the syntactic structural factor itself. However, given the results that strong forms of function words can be subdivided into phrase-final and accented types (Oh 2010), the prosodic phrasing of function words should be reconsidered with a syntactic and semantic approaches. Briefly reviewing various approaches to phrasing in prosodic phonology, this paper investigates an accent effect on the prosodic phrasing of function words and suggests a future experiment which can reveal how function words are prosodified with their adjacent words.