Re: resyllabification

[Geoff Nathan]

At 11:42 PM 10/26/2003, you wrote:
>i should have been clearer.  both "Misty Crivver" and "Sandi Proy" had
>syllable-initial aspiration; that's what made them so very noticeable.
>
>bob edwards tends to have ingressive variants of syllable-initial (but
>not syllable-final -- it's some sort of fortition) b, so his
>resyllabification is also easy to hear.

A friend of mine who immigrated to the US from Germany many years ago was
quite astonished to meet his new neighbor, Baugh Bellis, or so he
thought.  He and Bob Ellis now laugh about it.
But the resyllabification is quite real, especially with frequently uttered
constructions.  Often the resyllabification is driven by what Venneman
called 'syllable contact laws' (I know he didn't invent them, but he's
written on them in the past twenty years or so).  I'm pretty sure that's
what's going on with Mystic River, where __k] [r__ isn't as good a syllable
contact as __] [kr__.  And for Baugh Bedwards and his kin it may well be
that /b/'s are normally released in final position, permitting them to be
captured by the stressed onset-less following syllable--another syllable
law (Maximal Onset Principle).
Bybee's latest book argues for the role of frequency in phonological
restructuring, although I think she's wrong in her arguments about its
effect on allophones.  But still, if compounds are uttered frequently
enough they lose their phonological independence, at which point their
parts are available for purely phonology-driven realignment.

Geoff