Resumen de los Trabajos Empíricos en Psicología

This section will elucidate the typological universality of a broader, less restricted ver-sion of the DECOMPOSITIONT^HEOREM, which will be able to accommodate four of the five exceptions given in section 2.5. Universality, of course, is crucial in our study, as it allows us to reconstruct PIE syllabification in a reliable and credible fashion. To do so, we must establish a psychological connection between word-edge phonotactics and the process of medial syllabification. Consequently, it will become clear that the DT is not some ungrounded analytical tool devised for the study of medial syllabifica-tion; rather, it is a heuristic guideline innate to all humans for the purpose of dividing medial sequences into two distinct syllables, as Steriade (1999) proposes.

In the introduction of this seminal work, Steriade discusses the correlation between phonotactics, stress and intuitions of syllable division, which has been viewed by many to be strong evidence in favor of the assumption of the syllable as a unit of hierarchi-cal structure. To give an example, Steriade (ibid.) compares Spanish and (Cairene) Arabic, where three distinct facts appear to be motivated by a unitary phonological phenomenon.⁹⁰ In Spanish, words can begin with clusters consisting of stop + liq-uid (PR), such as tres ‘three’, but in Arabic they cannot. Similarly, post-consonantal PR is allowed in Spanish (semblanza ‘sketch’), but in Arabic, it is not. In Spanish, clusters of the shape PR do not count as heavy for stress assignment (fúnebre ‘sad’, not **funébre; contrast solémne ‘solemn’, not **sólemne), while those in Arabic do

90Data taken from Harris (1983) and Broselow (1976), respectively.

(tanábla ‘extremely lazy (pl.)’). Lastly, the native intuitions of syllabic division for word-medial sequences of the shape VPRV are V.PRV by speakers of Spanish (o.tros

‘others’) but are VP.RV by speakers of Arabic (zak.ru ‘they studied’).⁹¹

These differences in Spanish and Arabic with respect to phonotactics, stress as-signment and speaker intuition have in the past been interpreted to be the result of a single phonological fact: Spanish allows complex onsets of the shape PR, but Arabic does not.⁹² This has been seen by many to justify the assumption of the syllable as a phonological unit. However, for Steriade (ibid.) this assumption is unnecessary:

“Arabic lacks all word-initial clusters whereas Spanish allows TR [= PR (AMB)] clus-ters word-initially. Word finally Arabic permits a broad range of C’s, whereas native Spanish words end in sonorants or [s] only, not in stops. The syllable intuitions can be deduced entirely from the word edge differences: Spanish favors V.TRV over VT.RV parses because (a) word final stops are missing in the native lexicon and (b) TR initials are possible. Arabic on the other hand rejects V.TRV in favor of VT.RV because (a) TR initials (and all CC initials) are impossible and (b) VT finals are not ruled out.”

Steriade’s explanation, of course, looks very much like the DECOMPOSITIONTHE

-OREM. There is a key difference, however. Steriade does not in fact believe that syl-lable boundaries really exist word-medially; rather, she believes that speakers, when asked to perform the task of syllable division, infer syllable boundaries word-medially based on possible sequences at word’s edge. Steriade calls this inference the WORD

-BASED S^YLLABLES (WBS) hypothesis, which she explains as follows: “Speakers rely on inference when they attempt to locate syllable boundaries in a multi-vowelled string, and one guideline in this process is that the segmental composition of word and syllable edges must be similar.” Though for our purposes I will not reject the

91Ibid.

92Ibid.

phonological assumption of syllables altogether as Steriade has done, I will follow her insight into how speakers may choose to parse syllables word-medially. I contend that medial syllabification (and all phonological processes that derive therefrom) relies heavily upon a speaker’s knowledge of possible sequences at word’s edge in a lan-guage, but is not completely dependent upon it. Unlike the earlier formulation of the DT (34), which requires that medial consonant clusters be decomposable into an oc-curring word-final coda and word-initial onset, I propose that speakers infer the medial syllabification based on what is possible at word’s edge.

Much of the evidence that Steriade (1999) presents in favor of her WBS hypothesis comes from instances of variability of syllable divisions,⁹³ which she claims to arise when both phonotactic and syllabic preferences are in conflict with one another in a single parse. The word lemon, for example, exhibits variation in syllabification among speakers of English when surveyed. On the one hand, the parsing of a VCV sequence as V.CV is preferred, which would produce [lE.mn

˚], while on the other hand open syllables with a lax vowel are strictly prohibited, which would produce [lEm.n

˚]. This conflict is made clear through the variation of syllabification among speakers surveyed (Derwing 1992): 51% of those polled syllabified lemon as [lEm.n

˚], 37% as [lE.mn

˚] and 12% preferred the parse [lEm.mn

˚] with ambisyllabic m. Contrast this variation with the syllabification of the word demon among those same speakers surveyed; there was an 82% consensus for the parse [di.mn

˚]. The difference here, of course, is that the initial syllable has a tense vowel, which is permissible in word-final position (e.g. Eng. see), whereas there is no word like [lE]⁹⁴ in English.⁹⁵

93Cf. Treiman & Danis 1988.

94An exception lies in the very recent and very popular internet interjection ‘meh’ [mE] “[an] expres-sion of apathy or indifference” (American Heritage Dictionary).

95Similarly, in an analysis of syllabification and syllabically-driven phonological processes in Italian, McCrary (2004) assumes the perceptually driven phonotactic constraint LEX-C /INV OR V/L (“In the native lexicon, a consonant may only occur if it is after a vowel or followed by a vowel or liquid.”)

Further and more striking evidence comes from Arrernte,⁹⁶ where all words begin with a vowel and end in at least one consonant. Steriade’s WBS hypothesis correctly predicts the Arrernte syllable to be invariably of the shape VC(C0), whereas standard syllable-based phonological theory cannot (cf. Prince & Smolensky 1993). The un-usual syllable structure of Arrernte (VC(C0)) is confirmed through phonological pro-cesses such as reduplication tests, in which we see the reduplicant is clearly of the shape VC0: unt-em ‘is running’ + ep-RED _→ untepunt-em ‘keeps running’, atw-em

‘is hitting’ + ep-RED_→ atwepatw-em ‘keeps hitting’. Similar facts become apparent through language games such as ‘Rabbit Talk’, which moves the leftmost syllable to the end of the word (itirem ‘thinking’_→iremit, not **tiremi).⁹⁷

Translating her findings into an OT framework, Steriade (1999:226) tentatively proposes two word-to-syllable identity constraints.

(35) Word-to-syllable identity conditions.

“W-S(I): For any I, a syllable-initial segment, there is a word such that its initial segment is identical to I.

W-S(F): For any F, a syllable-final segment, there is a word such that its final segment is identical to F.”

to explain instances of speaker variation of syllabification of Italian words such as pasta ([pas]σ[ta]σ).

Without the assumption of the L^EX-C constraint, the WBS hypothesis would predict that the abundance of native words with initial onsets of the shape st-, as in stare ‘stand’ and the absence of native words ending in -s should always lead to the parse pa.sta. Those speakers with the ranking L^EX-C#W-S(I) chose the parse pas.ta, whereas pa.sta was chosen if a word-to-syllable identity was deemed to be more important (W-S(I) _# LEX-C). Another example may be seen in Polish, where a minority of Polish speakers surveyed by Dubiel (1994) parsed the words karta and pokorny as [ka.rta] and [po.ko.rny], respectively, despite the resulting SSP violation (see section 11). English speakers, on the other hand, unanimously reject such parses (Steriade 1999).

96A language spoken in central Australia of the Pama-Nyungan family. See Breen & Pensalfini (1999).

97As briefly mentioned in chapter 1, English has a similar language game called Pig Latin, which moves a word-initial onset to the end of the word (in part or in whole), followed by the diphthong -ay (Pig Latin_→Igpay Atinlay, dissertation_→issertationday, etc.).

Should we follow Steriade’s hypothesis, medial syllabification will crucially depend on the ranking of the word-to-syllable identity conditions W-S(I) and W-S(F) vis-à-vis the other constraints within a language’s phonology.