I begyndelsen af ordet: Konsonantklynger i moderne hebraisk

The elision of the vowel shewa (ᵊ) has resulted in the emergence of consonant clusters in Modern Hebrew. Clusters in native words are extremely limited in distribution. The consonants of some surface clusters undisputedly belong to the same underlying syllable while others appear to underlyingly belong to two syllables. The question is thus whether those surface clusters are underlying clusters or mere surface phenomena.By asking speakers of Hebrew how they would syllabify words with initial consonant clusters, I have found that some Hebrew speakers show a tendency to break up the clusters. This is particularly clear in monosyllabic words, where the majority of my informants break up the cluster.This suggests that for some Hebrew speakers, consonant clusters are disallowed at a certain level of phonological abstraction. Therefore, I propose that consonant clusters belong to the phonotactics of the prosodic word, not the syllable, and that the first segment in surface clusters be analyzed as extrasyllabic.