We examine the behavior of bare nouns in differential object marking and pseudo noun incorporation environments in Mongolian. Unmarked bare nouns and pseudo incorporated nouns have the same segmental structure; however, we show that they differ in their prosody. The prosodic word in Mongolian has a characteristic LH contour. This contour is found on unmarked bare nouns which are not pseudo incorporated; however the pseudo incorporated noun lacks this contour. Guntsetseg (2016) identifies various syntactic differences, which we use to provide a structural analysis of nominals. Specifically, the pseudo incorporated noun is a bare nP and non-pseudo incorporated nouns are full KPs, regardless of whether they are case marked or not. We propose an analysis in a modified version of Match Theory in which phases map to prosodic categories. Specifically for Mongolian the KP phase and the nP phase both map to a phonological word. Thus, a full KP contains two recursive phonological words, while a nP (a pseudo incorporated noun) contains only a single phonological word. We propose that only non-minimal phonological words bear a LH contour. Thus, only a full KP will appear with this contour.
1. Introduction
2. Background
3. Methodology
4. Results
5. Discussion
6. Conclusion
References