Reconciling Indo-European Syllabification

✍ Scribed by Adam I. Cooper

• Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 399
• Series: Brill's Studies in Indo-European Languages & Linguistics 13
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In Reconciling Indo-European Syllabification, Adam Cooper brings together two seemingly disparate phenomena associated with Indo-European syllable structure: the heterosyllabic treatment of medial consonant clusters, which tolerates CVC syllables, and the right-hand vocalization of sonorants, which ostensibly avoids them. Operating from a perspective that is simultaneously empirical, theoretical, and historical in nature, he establishes their compatibility by crafting a formal analysis that integrates them into a single picture of the reconstructed system.

More generally, drawing on evidence from Vedic, Greek, and Proto-Indo-European itself, Cooper demonstrates the continued relevance of the ancient Indo-European languages to contemporary linguistic theory, and, moreover, reaffirms the value of the syllable as a unit of phonology, necessary for these languages’ formal representation.

✦ Table of Contents

1 Introduction

Part 1: Consonant Heterosyllabicity in Indo-European
2 The Syllabification of Medial Consonant Clusters in Vedic
3 Formal Analysis of Vedic Medial Syllabification
4 Complementary Evidence for Medial Consonant Syllabification from the History of Greek
5 On the Syllabifications VOO.RV, VR.OOV

Part 2: Sonorant Vocalization in Proto-Indo-European
6 Background and Preliminaries
7 Previous Optimality-Theoretic Accounts of Sonorant Syllabicity
8 A New Approach to Proto-Indo-European Sonorant Syllabicity
9 Nucleus Selection as a Morphophonological Operation?
10 Implications and Typology of the Phonological Analysis of Sonorant Syllabicity
11 Conclusion and Future Directions

Appendix