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Against extrasyllabic consonants in German and English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2002

T. A. Hall
T. A. Hall
Affiliation:
University of Leipzig
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Abstract

The present article provides a reanalysis of word-edge coronal obstruents in German and English commonly assumed to be extrasyllabic (e.g. the [s] in German Gips ‘plaster' and in English lapse). It will be argued below that (i) there are no extrasyllabic consonants in surface representations in German and English and that surface forms are fully syllabified, and (ii) there is no derivational stage in which extrasyllabicity in either of these languages exists. The evidence commonly presented in support of representations with extrasyllabic consonants will be shown to be compatible with fully syllabified surface representations. An optimality-theoretic treatment with constraints referring to fully syllabified output representations will be proposed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , May 2002 , pp. 33 - 75
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Laura Downing, Antony Green, David Holsinger, Renate Raffelsiefen and Marzena Rochoń for discussion on the material presented below as well as for written comments on earlier incarnations of the present article. The quality of the final version has benefited tremendously from the comments made by three anonymous referees and by an anonymous associate editor of Phonology. Some of the ideas in the present study were presented at the University of Leipzig in November 1998 and at the Workshop on Contemporary Phonological Theory in Tromsø, Norway in June 2001. Thanks are due to the respective audiences for important feedback.