UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 11 (1999)

Release the captive coda: the foot as a domain of phonetic interpretation

JOHN HARRIS

The set of prosodic conditions on the phonetic interpretation of consonants can be advantageously constrained by abandoning the device of ambisyllabicity. Supposedly ambisyllabic regularities can be straightforwardly detailed by reference to their location within the independently necessary domain of the foot. Drawing on illustrative data from Danish and Ibibio, the paper outlines a theory of segmental form which allows explicit statements to be made about how foot-internal effects map onto the acoustic signal.

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