Locality Constraints on Prosodic Inversion

(building on joint work with Hannah Sande and Wendy L. A. López Márquez)

The existence of phonologically-driven displacement operations is well-known, but a variety of rules and mechanisms have been proposed to account for them. In this talk I present the analysis of Prosodic Inversion from Jenks and Sande (to appear), inspired by the analysis of infixation in Kalin (2022). In this model, Prosodic Inversion is conceived of as phonological movement which follows Vocabulary Insertion but precedes phonology, driven by prosodic subcategorization features. Unlike syntactic movement, Prosodic Inversion operates on linear strings and is countercyclic, but like syntactic movement it is subject to a variety of locality restrictions which make a derivational approach particularly promising. These include 1) domain-based effects, namely that only cyclically adjacent levels of the Prosodic Hierarchy are accessible 2) minimality effects, namely that Prosodic Inversion targets the closest available prosodic target, and 3) category-specific effects, including phonological processes on verbal suffixes in Nuntajiiyi and the restriction of Udi person marker endoclisis to verbs.