Persistence of prosody
Shigeto Kawahara, Jason Shaw
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003973
April 2018
Segments or prosody, which comes first? In this paper we address this general issue of the relationship between segments and prosody by examining the consequences of vowel deletion for syllabification. Our main empirical focus is Japanese. The EMA study by Shaw & Kawahara (2018) showed that Japanese [u] optionally deletes in devoicing environments, yielding consonant clusters. Both phonological and phonetic evidence reviewed here suggests that these consonant clusters are parsed heterosyllabically. The current results imply a rather surprising conclusion that Japanese allows consonantal syllables headed by a fricative or an affricate, a conclusion that is especially surprising in light of the view that considers Japanese a “strict CV-language”