Who needs a nucleus? Tashlhiyt Berber syllabification within the onset prominence representational environment

• Authors: Geoffrey Schwartz
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper presents an analysis of Tashlhiyt Berber syllabification in the Onset Promi-nence (OP) representational framework. With a structural perspective on manner of articulation, OP captures the apparent role of sonority in TB syllabification. It is shown, however, that this does not entail the assignment of "peak" status to the most sonorous available segments in a given string. Sonority based "peak" assignment cannot account for the ambiguous behavior exhibited by syllables in with the "peak" is less sonorous than its "onset", and makes infelicitous predictions with regard to the behavior of "onsetless" syllables. By contrast, the OP environment provides mechanisms in which such ambiguities fall out from more general principles of constituent formation.

Keywords

EN

phonotactics; syllabification; Onset Prominence; Berber; phonology

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 51
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 247-290

Dates

received

2014-10-28

revised

2014-12-28

accepted

2015-02-02

online

2015-06-30

Contributors

author

Geoffrey Schwartz

• Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/psicl-2015-0011