| Abstract: | Closed syllables exhibit a varied range of behaviors; moraic codas attract stress, nonmoraic codas have no influence on syllable weight, and extrasyllabic consonants may violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle (Selkirk 1984). Using the current conventions for representing syllable structure, moraic and nonmoraic codas are not differentiated by whether they are dominated by a mora, as their names suggest; the only distinction between them is how many moras the syllable contains. Extrasyllabicity is considered an entirely separate issue. I account for these differences within an Optimality Theoretic (OT, Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) framework and propose that all three types of syllable-closing consonants are derived from interaction of the same set of constraints. I argue that the different types of codas are the result of structural dissimilarities dependent on their relationship with superordinate structures in the prosodic hierarchy, which yields moraic codas, nonmoraic codas, and extrasyllabic consonants. |
