German case ambiguities at the interface: Production and comprehension
Tina Bögel · 2020
This article discusses a new approach to the interface between phonology/ prosody and syntax with regard to two perspectives: production and comprehension. Themodel assumes two transfer processes responsible for the exchange of information at the interface: the transfer of vocabulary, which operates at the word-level and below, and the transfer of structure, which is concerned with the association of syntactic and prosodic phrasing above the word-level. These transfer processes at the interface are illustrated by means of syntactically ambiguous German genitive/dative case constructions which can be resolved via prosodic phrasing. The relevant prosodic cues for the disambiguation were determined via a production experiment which also showed that the use of acoustic cues is not uniform across speakers. The proposedmodel allows for a straightforward and elegant resolution of the syntactic ambiguities at the interface to the prosodic module and can furthermore be extended to include speaker variability as well.