Nuclear phonology and aspiration and flapping in English*

Abstract

Linguists have long been preoccupied with the idea of proposing universal principles of syllable structure that would, in particular, predict the position of the nucleus and the syllable boundaries in a given sequence of segments. Various approaches to this problem have been proposed including those based on the relative phonological strength of the segments (cf. Hooper 1976) and the distributional approach which attempts to relate word internal syllable boundaries with word initial and word final boundaries (cf. Kuryłowicz 1960).