Phrase Structure and Intonational Phrases: Comments on the Papers by Marcus and Steedman

This paper is a commentary on two papers presented at the Workshop on Cognitive Models of Language, Sperlonga (Italy), May 1988. These two papers are: "Description Theory and Intonation Boundaries" by Mitch Marcus, and "Syntax and Intonation Structure in Combinatory Grammar" by Mark Steedman. Their approaches to the interface between syntax and metrical phonology are compared and certain problems with their approaches have been pointed out. A phrase structure-like approach, which is able to support some flexible phrasing and permit a set of analyses to hold simultaneously has been discussed also. This approach is based on structured objects as syntactic types rather than on curried functional syntactic types as in Steedman's work.