Phonotactics, markedness and lexical representation

Abstract

The theory proposed here, the Markedness Theory of Syllable Structure (MTSS), provides an account of syllabic phonotactics, wherein not only are features defining phonological content underspecified, but also those which determine the number and order of segments. The descriptive basis of MTSS in this paper consists of the minimally redundant underlying representations (URs) of stressed syllables in English. These forms are parsimoniously accounted for by a theory in which content features are associated with prosodic nodes in UR, and which contains an algorithm which maps UR prosodic nodes, specified for feature content, into strings of timing units ( x 's on the skeletal tier), with fully specified syllabic structures on the prosodic tier.