| Abstract: | The Australian language Arrernte has been argued by Breen & Pensalfini (1999) and Evans & Levinson (2009) to present a case of VC syllabification (vowel-consonant constituency, with coda maximization), rather than CV syllabification (consonant-vowel constituency, with onset maximization). In this paper we demonstrate that greater insights for a number of phenomena are achieved when analyzed with CV syllabification and onset consonants that are moraic, a possibility independently proposed for a wide range of languages by Topintzi (2010). Previous analyses were obliged to posit an underlying fleeting initial schwa for surface forms beginning with CV at the left edge; we demonstrate that once the full range of phenomena are considered, no such schwa is desirable, and that these words are underlyingly CV-initial. We review a range of prosodic morphology and external evidence from phonetic studies, acquisition, and musicology that points towards a CV syllabification in Arrernte and provide an analysis for the allomorphy, stress assignment, reduplication, and the transpositional language game 'Rabbit Talk' in terms of reference to moraic structure. The results lend themselves to new directions in the analysis of Arrernte and provide further evidence for moraic onsets in prosodic morphology. |
