Phonetic cues and phonological constraints in prosodic unit definition: evidence for the intermediate phrase in French

The two experiments reported here support an analysis based on constraints which reflect the syntax-prosody interface. This analysis proves that the Intermediate Phrase (ip) exists in French. The ip is ranked higher than the Accentual Phrase and smaller than the Intonation Phrase in the prosodic hierarchy and it is not restricted to specific syntactic marked constructions as it was previously proposed. We predict that the interaction of (i) a syntactic constraint (ALIGN-XP,R, ip, R) which align the right edge of a maximal projection with the right edge of an ip with (ii) a phonological constraint (MIN-BIN) stating that non final ip consists of minimally two APs, conspires to place an ip-boundary in French. An interesting interplay of duration and pitch height is responsible for signaling the boundary