Interaction at the prosody-syntax interface

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the advantage of integrating sentence-final intonation into the syntactic spine. This addresses a gap in the literature first identified by Truckenbrodt (2012). Our case is built on the similarity of sentence-final particles and sentence-final intonation in Canadian English for Common Ground management. Some sentence final particles, such as Canadian eh, encode a request for confirmation of the speaker’s belief. These particles contribute to CommonGroundmanagement in that they encode the speaker’s commitment towards the proposition encoded in an utterance. In addition, their prosodic properties also contribute to Common Groundmanagement by engaging the addressee to respond to the utterance. To model this observation, we assume two layers above CP which are responsible for these functions: GroundP and ResponseP (Wiltschko & Heim 2016; Wiltschko 2017). We show that this model can explain the prosodic variation of the sentence-final particle eh along with those of different sentence-final contours. With a syntactic integration of GroundP and ResponseP, we can better explain the distributional restrictions of sentence-final particles and their relation to the host clause than models without a syntactic integration of Common Ground managers. Furthermore, a unified analysis for sentence final-particles and sentence-final intonation allows for systematic crosslinguistic comparison between languages that appear to use different linguistic means for Common Ground management. Our analysis is grounded in a conversational model that assumes Common Ground to be the product of a dynamic and complex negotiation between the interlocutors (Brennan & Clark 1991; Farkas & Bruce 2010).