Second-Position Clitics and Prosodic Recursion

Abstract

Recent work suggests that prosodic structure has the capacity to retain significant information about recursive syntactic constituency. This paper presents a novel argument for this view from the domain of second-position clitic linearization. In Mandar (Austronesian, Indonesia), many second-positon elements are linearized in domains which correspond to functional projections along the clausal spine (TP, vP). The process which positions these clitics is irreducibly postsyntactic in nature. This observation suggests that TP, vP, and other 'functional' phrases must remain constituents at a prosodic level of representation. This conclusion provides further evidence for the view that under ideal circumstances, syntactic phrases map to prosodic equivalents in a one-to-one fashion.