earticle

영어

This study provides an alternative analysis of English syncope occurring in post-stressed positions to improve syllable parsing and foot structure in English. In post-tonic syllables, two types of syncope occur: one is general syncope, where only a vowel in an unstressed vowel deletes, and the other is a variant syncope in which two unstressed vowels delete. Analyses on syncope so far have focused on syncope environments and the clusters to be formed after syncope. It has been argued that syncope occurs when consonant clusters formed after syncope show a rising sonority. This common factor has been the major argument in syncope. However, such a concept might be problematic in multiple-syllabled inputs where two variant syncope outputs are possible. To avoid such a problem in syncope, we need to limit the domain of syncope to a foot. Thus, if there are two feet and syncope occurs in the first trisyllabic left-headed foot, the vowels in the first and second syllables become the target of syncope. To distinguish a preferred syncope output from a secondarily favored output, we employ constraint reranking of Parse-σ/NoCoda and *Comp-Ons/Contig-Rt, which are not highly ranked in the analysis to explain the most common type of syncope and variant syncope outputs by using two combined constraint rankings in English.