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In
Reconciling Indo-European Syllabification, Adam Cooper brings together two seemingly disparate phenomena associated with Indo-European syllable structure: the heterosyllabic treatment of medial consonant clusters, which tolerates CVC syllables, and the right-hand vocalization of sonorants, which ostensibly avoids them. Operating from a perspective that is simultaneously empirical, theoretical, and historical in nature, he establishes their compatibility by crafting a formal analysis that integrates them into a single picture of the reconstructed system.
More generally, drawing on evidence from Vedic, Greek, and Proto-Indo-European itself, Cooper demonstrates the continued relevance of the ancient Indo-European languages to contemporary linguistic theory, and, moreover, reaffirms the value of the syllable as a unit of phonology, necessary for these languages’ formal representation.
More generally, drawing on evidence from Vedic, Greek, and Proto-Indo-European itself, Cooper demonstrates the continued relevance of the ancient Indo-European languages to contemporary linguistic theory, and, moreover, reaffirms the value of the syllable as a unit of phonology, necessary for these languages’ formal representation.
In
Reconciling Indo-European Syllabification, Adam Cooper brings together two seemingly disparate phenomena associated with Indo-European syllable structure: the heterosyllabic treatment of medial consonant clusters, which tolerates CVC syllables, and the right-hand vocalization of sonorants, which ostensibly avoids them. Operating from a perspective that is simultaneously empirical, theoretical, and historical in nature, he establishes their compatibility by crafting a formal analysis that integrates them into a single picture of the reconstructed system.
More generally, drawing on evidence from Vedic, Greek, and Proto-Indo-European itself, Cooper demonstrates the continued relevance of the ancient Indo-European languages to contemporary linguistic theory, and, moreover, reaffirms the value of the syllable as a unit of phonology, necessary for these languages’ formal representation.
More generally, drawing on evidence from Vedic, Greek, and Proto-Indo-European itself, Cooper demonstrates the continued relevance of the ancient Indo-European languages to contemporary linguistic theory, and, moreover, reaffirms the value of the syllable as a unit of phonology, necessary for these languages’ formal representation.
One of the most prominent features of reconstructed PIE phonology is sonorant syllabicity: sonorant consonants function as syllable peaks when, generally speaking, they are not adjacent to a vowel. The general acceptance of this phenomenon in its various contours has persisted (see e.g. Mayrhofer 1986, Fortson 2009, Meier-Brügger 2010, Weiss 2011, etc.), despite the absence, for the most part, of any attempt to ascertain its credibility along the cross-linguistic dimension. In this paper, we evaluate the reconstructed PIE system from precisely this perspective. In comparing the established properties of PIE syllabic sonorants—including their distribution across words and morphemes, the complexity of their syllable margins, their participation in prosodic phenomena, their morphophonological alternation, and the directionality of their vocalization—against a survey of syllabic consonants across the languages of the world, we demonstrate the typological plausibility of the reconstruction, and so reinforce the confidence with which it has been maintained.