earticle

영어

This study provides an explicit analysis of syllabic consonant formation in Southern British English within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1995). The process brings some challenging aspects, given that syllabic nasal stops [n] and [m] are limited in their occurrence, while liquids and glides freely occur as a syllabic. In this study, the process can straightforwardly be accounted for by proposing some markedness constraints which demand well-formedness of intrasyllabic phonotactics with regard to sonority and local constraint conjunction which prohibits some particularly disfavored forms, within the framework of OT. In addition, this analysis implies that SSP is not crucial in SCF, unlike the previous approaches. Instead, conditional MSD between a syllabic nasal and its preceding marginal consonant plays a primary role to determine vowel syncope and SCF.