ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 of this book has drawn a clear picture of how prosody constrains syntax and this picture can be very well summarized in one sentence: the sentences in Chinese can neither tolerate left-heaviness’, nor ‘right-heaviness’. It is further shown how this picture of prosodically constrained syntax is derived by investigating linguistic facts of six aspects, namely, the left-heavy VO structures, the left-heavy BA constructions, the left-heavy Bei constructions, the right-heavy [VO+FP/DP], the right-heavy sentences with the [VO+PP] structure, the right-heavy sentences with the [VR+O] structure. To be more specific, the so-called ‘left-heavy’ concerns with the relation between a verb and its complements and means that the verb is heavier than its complement, which is of course not allowed in Chinese. The ‘right-heavy’ here means that there are two non-distressable constituents after the verb and thus only the first one can obtain the stress, which is also not allowed in Chinese. In short, through the introduction here, we hope that we can present the promising prospects of Prosodic Syntax as an emerging discipline in general linguistics.
