This revision of a PowerPoint presentation from a University of British Columbia talk on 4 March 2021 outlines how a phonologically driven theory of grammar (Schmerling 1983a, b, 2019) explains apparent misalignments of syntactic and prosodic structures as resulting from operations that substitute units of varying weight at prosodic edges, applying bottom to top in the formation of larger structures. On this approach, syntax is semantically relevant relations among prosodic structures . This theory is a generalization to units larger than prosodic words of the item and process morphology of Edward Sapir and his students. A Sapirian perspective on the relationship between grammar and phonology allows us to view “bracketing paradoxes” identified to date as involving generalized affixations, i.e., as operations that increment prosodic words within prosodic phrases. An appropriately broad perspective on the sound grammar relationship lets us see such affixations as akin to widely attested substitutions of units that are properly contained in words, like the mutations of Celtic initial consonants
or of syllable nuclei as in Germanic umlaut and Indo European and Penutian ablaut. A grammatical architecture in which formation operations apply directly to phonological structures allows us to revisit our conception of the motivation for syntactic categories, which can now be seen as divorced from units properly seen as prosodic and which are thus applicable to languages traditionally seen as typologically incommensurate. A further advantage of this approach to linguistic structure is its ability to explain lexicalization of linguistic expressions as simply entailing a prosodic structure (initially) ceasing to be derived according to some formation rule.