Overlap of prosodic constituents in Old Souletin Basque.

The article deals with a typologically unusual phenomenon, the overlap of Prosodic Hierarchy constituents, where one prosodic constituent belongs to two constituents of a higher level (cf. [iemazté [jbát]i-i]j (woman one-dat) ‘to a woman’) in the Old Souletin dialect of Basque. The property in question is typical of the indefinite marker bat, historically derived from the numeral bat ‘one’. The author draws some typological parallels not only from prosody, but also from other levels of linguistic structure. The phenomenon under consideration can be regarded as a counterexample to the well-known Prosodic Hierarchy, but can be accounted for in terms of Brett Hyde’s theory of Weak Bracketing.