Phonological evidence for the structure of Javanese compounds

This paper presents field data from Javanese showing that Noun-Noun and Noun-Adjective compounds in Javanese are phonologically distinct from both non-compound words and phrases. I explore the idea that this behavior can be explained by a syntactic approach in which this difference arises from a distinction between early and late spell-out (Chomsky 1999). I further argue that various phonological approaches to the same data are unable to produce the desired surface forms.

• Affiliations: 1: University of California, Los Angeles