Phrase-level and word-level syllables: Resyllabification and prosodization of clitics

Prosodic Theory and, in particular, the Strict Layer Hypothesis (SLH), maintain that each level of the prosodic hierarchy is fully contained within the level dominating it (Nespor and Vogel 1986, Selkirk 1995). However, in some languages a syllable is not necessarily contained within a single Prosodic Word (PW). In this paper, we investigate two such cases of violation of the SLH: the prosodization of Romance “free” clitics, or clitics that are incorporated into prosodic structure at the level of the Phonological Phrase (PP) (Selkirk 1995) (we analyse data from the northern Italian dialect of Donceto) and phrasal resyllabification, or the situation in which a single syllable contains elements belonging to two different words. We propose that the resyllabification facts and the prosodization of free clitics can be best accounted for by adopting a model of the prosodic hierarchy in which there is an additional phrasal syllable level nested under the PP-level. In other words, there are two syllable representations.