The Interaction of Stress and Syllabification: Serial or Parallel?

It is a standard assumption in phonology that stress is assigned to syllables. It would seem to be common sense, then, that syllabification precedes stress assignment. But, as we will see, common sense is wrong in this particular case. Based on evidence from Finnish, we will show that syllabification cannot strictly precede stress assignment, but that the two happen in parallel, as in classical Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004). This is potentially problematic for theories where stress and syllabification interact serially, such as in Harmonic Serialism (e.g., McCarthy 2008, 2010; Kimper 2011; Pater 2012; Elfner 2016; Elsman 2016).∗ In Finnish, a sequence of two vowels (/V1V2/) can be syllabified in two ways: The vowels may join to become one syllable nucleus, i.e., a diphthong, or they may split to become two separate syllable nuclei. The two options are illustrated in (1). As we will demonstrate, this choice depends on stress.