APOCOPE AND THE LICENSING OF EMPTY-HEADED SYLLABLES

The surface effect of such a rule is to produce phonetically word-final consonants. Assuming a theory of licensing outlined in the following section, I argue in this article that such derived word-final consonants must be syllabified either äs codas or äs onsets of syllables that lack phonetic heads, i.e. empty-headed syllables. The crucial structural difference between the latter type and a syllable with a phonetic head is illustrated in (2); the representations are given in terms of the modified moraic theory of syllable structure proposed by Piggott (1991a).