Two articles by Brodkin appear in print

Two journal articles by sixth-year PhD student Dan Brodkin have appeared by “early access” in print. One, “The prosody of the extended VP”, is forthcoming in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and investigates the syntax-prosody interface in Mandar:

This paper investigates the syntax of VSO and VOS clauses in Mandar (Austronesian) by leveraging the prosody. This language allows free alternations between VSO and VOS orders, but phonotactic diagnostics reveal that VSO strings are optimally parsed into tight prosodic constituents while VOS strings are not. These results converge with syntactic diagnostics to show that VSO orders arise from leftward movement of the verb while VOS orders are generated through an additional step of rightward scrambling of the S. Targeted manipulations then reveal that phonological phrases can be built around substrings of arguments in the VSO string, providing a new type of evidence for fine functional structure in the extended VP (Larson 1988). The prosodic parse of scrambled arguments, finally, shows that scrambling places its targets in adjunct positions (Chomsky 1993) in Mandar, setting up an account of scrambling that is grounded in the principle of Greed (Lasnik 1995).

Another, “Suppletion in global perspective”, will appear in Linguistic Inquiry and analyzes a system of suppletion in Mandar (download the pdf):

This article documents and analyzes a system of suppletive alternations that are conditioned by top-down prosodic context. In Mandar (Austronesian), seven heads supplete at the right edge of the phonological phrase to satisfy an output constraint on foot structure. When phrase-external phonological context makes it possible to resolve this output constraint in a more optimal way, these patterns of suppletion are suspended. These effects suggest that the mechanism that regulates suppletion, Vocabulary Insertion, must be situated within a phonological calculus that can access global context and respond to output constraints.

Congratulations, Dan!