Re: Moraic codas [was Re: 'Yemls Morphology]

Andreas Johansson wrote:

> >Actually, syllabification in English seems to be abnormally tricky because
> >of the problem
> >of ambisyllabic consonants.  My impression is that in most languages,
> >speakers have no
> >trouble at all agreeing on how to syllabify a word.
>
> What is an "ambisyllabic consonant"?
This was discussed on the list a while back, so you could look in the archives.

Briefly, an ambisyllabic consonant is a consonant which speakers feel belongs
to two syllables at the same time.  For example, in the word "happy" /h&pi/,
English speakers have a hard time deciding if the /p/ belongs to the first
syllable or the second syllable--in other words, we can't decide if it's
/h&.pi/ or /h&p.i/.  In a sense it's both.  If you ask an English speaker to
pronounce the word "happy" one syllable at a time, they will generally prolong
the /p/ over both syllables ("hap...py"), even though when they speak the word
normally they don't use a geminate /p/.

I've always assumed that the ambisyllabic effect as a sort of compromise in the
face of conflicting phonotactic constraints:  Vowels like /&/ can't end in a
syllable in English, so the /p/ is analyzed as a coda consonant which closes
off the first syllable in "happy".  However, English also doesn't like a
syllable beginning with a vowel to come after a syllable ending in a consonant,
so /p/ gets simultaneously analyzed as the onset of the second syllable in
"happy".

Matt.

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