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

Authors:

• Geoffrey Schwartz

Abstract

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.