The representation of ambisyllabicity.

The representation of ambisyllabicity

Ever since it became recognized that long (geminate) consonants are best thought of as a single consonant shared by two adjacent syllables, the question arose of how this differs from ambisyllabicity. Perhaps the majority view has been that it does not differ at all. Borowsky et al. (1984) suggested that languages have either true geminates, or ambisyllabicity, or neither, but not both. Therefore the same representation can be used for both phenomena; whether the shared consonant is pronounced long or short is a matter of phonetic implementation. Borowsky et al. provided positive evidence that ambisyllabic consonants in Danish behave like geminates, since they are immune to lenition in a word like kappa (/kapa/, not */kaba/); immunity to coda lenitions is a well-known property of geminates. Hulst (1985:61) pointed out that Dutch ambisyllabic consonants are immune to devoicing, another property credibly attributable to geminate inalterability. On the other hand, people who believe that there is contrasting ambisyllabicity and gemination in the same language need to draw a structural distinction. Suzuki (1985:106) criticizes Lass for having to add an extra CV tier so that ambisyllabicity (CC aligns with C) can be distinguished from gemination (CC aligns with CC), but it is not clear what Suzuki's alternative is. Kang (1991:92), working within Moraic Theory, has both types of consonants linked to two moras, including the first mora of the posterior syllable; but whereas ambisyllabic consonants are linked to the only mora of the prior syllable, geminate consonants are linked to the second mora of the prior syllable, a mora which is assigned to the geminate consonant lexically. But while such proposals are certainly worth entertaining, I am not convinced of the presence of ambisyllabicity in either Old English or Korean, for the reasons stated above, so the economical possibility that gemination and ambisyllabicity have the same representation needs to remain open.

[Forward to Prior proposals for Sanskrit syllabification.]

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