Introduction

This chapter offers a general introduction of this new branch of linguistics, namely Prosodic Syntax, which is developed in this book. This chapter first introduces the goals of this book, that is, to reveal the constraint of prosody on syntactic structures and the methodology of this book. Then this chapter describes intensively the formal syntactic theory, namely, the Government and Binding theory to which the framework of this book has resorted, including move- α, the X-bar structure, the Case-theory and the fundamental principles of Prosody such as the Relative Prominence Principle, the Nuclear Stress Principle and the Branching Node Condition. Lastly, this chapter introduces the coordination and conflict among Prosodic Rules and the adjustments that have been triggered to solve the conflicts.