In this talk, I’ll argue for a surprising condition on the prosody of embedded CPs, which I’ll call Clausal Downstepping:
(1) Clausal Downstepping: All phonological material within a CP must be immediately downstepped with respect to the phonological material of the head which immediately projects over it.
Downstep is a cross-linguistically attested phenomenon in which high tones within a prosodic domain are lowered with respect to preceding high tones, triggered at specific points within an utterance. It has been well-established that in many languages, downstep has a strong connection to syntactic and prosodic structure. I’ll give a brief primer on the relevant prosodic background and show the varying ways that (1) is satisfied cross-linguistically.
Next, I’ll argue that (1), along with the inherently left-to-right nature of downstep, provides an explanation for the commonly attested phenomenon of clausal extraposition. Clausal extraposition, a phenomenon seen in many SOV (German, Hindi, Turkish, Persian) and VOS (Malagasy, Toba Batak) languages, involves clausal objects obligatorily appearing in a peripheral position (2) despite normal objects appearing in a non-peripheral position (3) .
Furthermore, I’ll argue that (1) provides better empirical coverage of the surface distribution of CPs in these languages than previous prosodic, syntactic, and semantic accounts.