14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Syllabification in Berber: The Case of Tashlhiyt

Gilbert Puech, Naima Louali

Dynamique Du Langage - CNRS, Université Lyon 2, France

It has been claimed that in the Tashlhiyt variety of Berber, spoken in the southern part of Morocco, all types of segments, including unvoiced stops, may function as syllabic. This interpretation is intrinsically dependent on how words are analyzed into syllables. The main goal of this paper is to investigate how native speakers regard these forms. An experiment in which Tashlhiyt speakers matched words with potentially syllabic consonants with words unambiguously composed of one or two syllables was conducted. The conditions for a consonant to function as the nucleus of a syllable implied by the results are then discussed.

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Bibliographic reference.  Puech, Gilbert / Louali, Naima (1999): "Syllabification in Berber: the case of Tashlhiyt", In ICPhS-14, 747-750.