Syllable‐Internal Structure

There is no simple discovery procedure for determining phonological syllable structure (which, like phonological representations in general, may not be in a one‐to‐one relationship with systematic phonetic syllabification, and which may not necessarily conform to native speaker intuitions about syllable division). The nature of the mechanism which assigns syllabification (defines possible syllables) for a given language is an empirical hypothesis, whose confirmation depends on the extent to which linguistically significant generalizations can be expressed under it (Feinstein 1979: 255).