ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that the Accentual Phrase as a constituent that is higher than the Prosodic Word level in the prosodic hierarchy; one Accentual Phrase can be the same as the Prosodic Word but can have more than one Prosodic Word. It defines the Prosodic Word indirectly based on the assumptions of the Strict Layer Hypothesis. The chapter discusses the results of the experiment showing that there is a prosodic level which is the domain of phonetic feature reduction effect and which is smaller than the Accentual Phrase level. Since the corpus in the experiment is a single noun, either one lexical item or lexical compound, we cannot test if there is a phonetic feature reduction domain smaller than a lexical item, a noun. Phonetic studies show that the pronunciation of segments depends on word and phrase level prosody. Many of these effects can be subsumed under the notion "lenition".
