Word margins.

Evidence for OM: Word margins.

Perhaps the first documented approach to defining syllable boundaries was to look at the beginnings and ends of words. According to Allen (1953:82), Herodian taught that clusters that begin words also begin syllables within words. Thus he not only was in favour of Onset Maximization, but he also provided a useful test as to what might be found in a maximized onset. Similar approaches have been used more recently (Anderson and Jones 1974:4, Kahn 1976:39-40), although some have cautioned that word margins may have extra restrictions that do not apply to word-internal syllables, or that they conversely may contain appendices admitting segments not licensed by word-internal syllables (Booij 1983:251-252, Hayes 1980:148). Fortunately Sanskrit turns out not to have appendices (Kurylowicz 1948:214), and phonological word margins have almost no additional restrictions over syllable margins. (The exception is that r is devoiced at the end of a word, though not within compound words.)

  • Word beginnings.
  • Word endings.
  • Sandhi.
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