ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, “Prosodic domains and the syntax-phonology interface: a chronological overview,” provides a comprehensive review of the development of theories of the syntax-phonology interface from over the past five decades. It shows that developments in syntactic theory often enable new directions in the study of syntax-phonology mapping: the cyclic approach to syntax in the 1960s and the 1970s led to a cyclic approach to stress assignment; the X-bar Theory in the 1980s contributed greatly to the Relation-based Theory and End-based Theory; and the phase theory in the mid-1990s to 2000s revived cyclic approaches to syntax-phonology mapping, thereby unifying phonological and transformational cycles. On the other hand, Optimality Theory approaches to phonology are strictly representational and often completely deny the postulation of cyclic or derivational rule application. The more recent Match Theory, which is the evolution of End-based Theory, is framed within Optimality Theory, and does not depend on the sequential computational processes of syntactic derivation: prosodic domains are defined on the syntactic representation.
