A declarative approach to onset maximisation

Abstract

A consonantal cluster is sometimes structurally ambiguous according to the phonotactic grammar of French. Actually, a maximum of consonants must be associated to the onset of the right-hand syllable. 'Marbre' is syllabified as /mar·bre/, not */marb·re/. In Declarative Phonology, Onset Maximisation must be realised by means of unification, not by a resyllabification process that modifies a prespecified structure. In this paper, I propose a declarative analysis of onset maximisation in the form of a constraint on syllable strings.