Syllabification and Syllable Changing Processes in Yawelmani

Rule (2) is ordered before (1) and applies only in forms containing a suffix which selects the 'zero' stem of the verb bases (in Newman's (1944) (the main source on Yawelmani) terminology) (I will discuss this selection process later in detail). Looking back at this today we can see that these rules work to avoid impermissible syllables in Yawelmani. If we look into the corpus provided by Newman (1944), we see that with very few exceptions, the possible syllable types are restricted to CV, CVC and CVJVJ (or CV:). Once we have established these three types, it can be seen that there are even more rules taking part in the conspiracy to restrict syllables to these three types than the ones mentioned by Kisseberth. Consider the following two rules proposed by Kuroda (1967) and Kisseberth (1969):