Immediate Constituents of Mazateco Syllables

1. It is well known that sentences have an internal structure which can be analyzed in terms of successive layers of immediate constituents.l Thus, the sentence Poor John ran away divides first into Poor John and ran away, then Poor John divides into Poor and John, while ran away divides into ran and away, and so on. It is convenient to describe syllables of Mazateco2 in a similar fashion. The structure of these syllables does not consist of a series of sounds equally related, like beads on a string, but is rather like an overlapping series of layers of bricks. The different