Abstract

An important executive function in “language design” is marking the boundaries of embedded clauses, and of clauses (and clause sequences) in the scopal domain of operators such as conditional ‘if’ and negation. Crosslinguistic comparison reveals a range of devices that have this effect, facilitating parsing by listeners. These include (i) prosody, (ii) constituent ordering, (iii) coordination, (iv) boundary-markingmorphemes, and (v) continuousmorphological indexation. The last two are emphasized in this article, with data from Australian and West African languages. Such boundary-marking functions deserve greater recognition in grammatical typology, especially since acoustic analogues have been well-studied by phoneticians.