Phrase-Final Suffixes at the Syntax-Prosody Interface: A Corpus Study of Chichicastenango K’iche’

Certain K’iche’ (Mayan) verbal suffixes have phrase-final and phrase-medial forms. This alternation has been alternately analyzed as dependent on syntax (clause boundaries) or prosody (intonational phrase [IP] boundaries), primarily on the basis of elicited data. This paper presents a study of the alternation in a corpus of spontaneous speech from the Chichicastenango dialect. The results show that phrase-final forms correlate strongly with both clause boundaries and IP-final boundary tones in most contexts, but this alignment breaks down in structures with clause-level recursion. It is argued that phrase-final forms occur before all IP boundaries, while boundary tones are limited to the end of the highest IP. Recursive syntactic structures may be parsed into different prosodic structures, recursive or non-recursive. This produces a highly correlated but not identical distribution of clause boundaries, boundaries tones, and phrase-final status suffixes.