volume: 4 (2000)
pages: 117–152
author: Péter Szigetvári
title: Why CVCV
abstract: One of the most important achievements of modern linguistics is the discovery of the use of emptiness. Its relevance can be likened to that of the concept of zero, without which it is hard to imagine the progress natural sciences have made in the last few centuries. One aim of the paper is to convince the reader that empty positions in the phonological skeleton are not merely a tricky device to ease the analysis, but rather a logical conclusion of various different lines of thought pursued by theorists of modern phonology. Once one accepts the possibility of empty skeletal positions it is fairly obvious that they must be exploited. The evident use of the idea is that syllable structure can be radically simplified if we are not obliged to take surface adjacency in phonological strings to be an unrefutable symptom of adjacency in the underlying representation as well. In the second part of this paper I argue for the radically reduced syllable constituency proposed by Lowenstamm (1996) and advocated by his students. The skeleton can be likened to a binary system, each skeletal string contains strictly alternating consonantal and vocalic positions.
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