Prosodic smothering in Macedonian and Kaqchikel

Dependent morphemes may idiosyncratically select for the prosodic constituent produced when that morpheme attaches to a phonological host (vertical subcategorization). We argue that vertical subcategorization is responsible for the contextually-variable prosodic behavior of certain functional items in Macedonian (Slavic, Macedonia) and Kaqchikel (Mayan, Guatemala). In short, the vertical subcategorization requirements of an outer morpheme can alter the prosodic parsing of an inner morpheme in the same complex. This gives rise to prosodic alternations like [A [B]] ~ [X A B], in which the prosodic boundary between A and B is sensitive to the presence or absence of outer morpheme X (the selecting morpheme). We refer to this phenomenon as prosodic smothering, and show that vertical subcategorization offers a compact and insightful treatment of such patterns. These facts ultimately lead to the conclusion that word- and phrase-level prosody is mediated by significantly more lexical information than is normally assumed.