Phonotactics: Syllable Structure

Abstract The phonological or phonotactic well-formedness of a word can be seen as an interplay of two factors: a prosodic and a non-prosodic one. On the one hand, a phonologically well-formed word must be parsable into (wellformed) prosodic units. It is generally assumed that the prosodic unit that is chiefly responsible for phonotactic well-formedness is the syllable, but there are well-known examples of phonotactic constraints whose domain is a higher level prosodic unit such as the foot or the prosodic word. As the foot does not seem to play an important role in Hungarian, a phonotactically well-formed Hungarian word is a unit which is exhaustively parsable into well-formed syllables. Thus, the phonotactic well-formedness of a word is derivable from well-formedness conditions on syllables (Syllable Structure Constraints (SSCs)). This relation between the well-formedness of words and syllables, however, is not symmetrical: while it holds that a well-formed word consists of a string of well-formed syllables, it is not true that any string of well-formed syllables constitutes a well-formed (potentiai) word: there are transsyllabic constraints that obtain between syllables, or more precisely, between adjacent subconstituents of different syllables. These constraints do not refer to a prosodic unit higher than the syllable, but impose restrictions on the bonding of syllable edges (interconstituent clusters). In addition, as we have pointed out above, a language may have constraints on prosodic structure that directly refer to prosodic units higher than the syllable (e.g. conditions on word minimality, etc.).