The Review of Prosody-Syntax Interface Research in the Past Two Decades

The study of prosody-syntax interface has become a hot topic in the past two decades.By reviewing important publications in the area, this paper generalizes two major trends:on the one hand, mainstream research still holds the uni-directional view between syntax and phonology, of which the Direct Reference Theory and the Indirect Reference Theory, have all adopted Minimalist assumptions and formulated their new model for syntax-prosody mapping; on the other hand, some research upholds the bi-directional interactional view and emphasizes the influence of prosody on syntax, which can be revealed by the proposals of prosodically-constrained syntax and prosodically-motivated syntactic operation.The two trends move forward spirally and both contribute to resolving many tricky issues as well as rethinking on the architecture of grammar.