Prosodic phonology

This chapter reviews evidence for the prosodic underpinnings of English phonology, starting with the syllable. We first review extralinguistic evidence for this unit and then the classical phonological arguments for syllable structure. We also treat more controversial aspects of English syllable structure, for example, final clusters, ambisyllabicity, and timing units. We next turn to higher-level foot structure beginning with a discussion of the extralinguistic evidence, followed by phonological evidence. We then turn to the controversial aspects of foot structure, for example, ternarity, quantity-sensitivity, and predictability.