14th Manchester Phonology Meeting, May 25th, 2006, University of Manchester 1 Cross-linguistic Challenges for the Prosodic Hierarchy: Evidence from Word Domains 1 Kristine Hildebrandt # , René Schiering * , Balthasar Bickel * * University of Leipzig and # University of Manchester 1. Introduction (1) The Prosodic Hierarchy PROSODIC DOMAIN PROPERTIES MAPPING U e.g. English flapping | I intonation contours syntactic information | Φ postlexical processes | C clitic-specific processes morphosyntactic information | ω minimality, phonotactics, processes morphological information | Σ stress, rhythm, segmental rules | σ phonological information | stress, sonority µ (2) Predictions made by the standard theory (see also Selkirk 1984, Itô & Mester 1992) 1. Clustering: phonological domains cluster on a single universal set of domains (discussed by Inkelas & Zec 1995). 2. Strict Succession: all languages have at least the domains listed in (1) (= Nespor & Vogel’s (1986: 7) Principle 1). 3. Proper Bracketing: no language has non-stacking domains (=Nespor & Vogel’s (1986: 7) Principle 2). (3) “While there is no a priori reason that the phonology of a given must include all […] units, we will make the assumption here that this is the case, an assumption that can be motivated on both general and theory-specific grounds.” (Nespor & Vogel 1986: 11) 1 We would like to acknowledge the assistance of Joshua Wilbur and Franziska Crell in collecting and evaluating the data presented here. We are also grateful to Michael Dunn who shared his expertise on Chukchi with us.