2024/08/12 by Benjamin Macaulay · 2 voices
Psychology · Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation #Linguistic Variation and Morphology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1515/tl-2024-2013
openalex publication_date 2024/08/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Abstract The ease and consistency with which speakers of many languages provide direct judgments about syllable structure has been taken by scholars as evidence that these judgments are accurate and sufficient argumentation for an analysis of syllable structure in descriptive works. This paper questions whether the results of direct elicitation tasks reliably indicate a prosodic domain that is meaningful in the language’s phonology and provides alternative forms of evidence for syllable structure from intonation. This is done through a case study of Budai Rukai, a Formosan language whose contact relationship with Sinitic languages affects how speakers respond to syllable judgment tasks.