Epenthesis Positioning and Syllable Contact in English and French

This study addresses the positioning of an epenthetic element used as a marker of emphasis in English and French within Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004). The epentheses to be analyzed here are mostly considered “syllable structure optimization” (Sommerstein 1977: 227), which introduces a less than ideal syllable structure to the CV-structure. The source epentheses highlight an application of a Markedness constraint SYLLCON (Rose 2000), which requires that “the first segment of the onset of a syllable must be lower in sonority than the last segment in the immediately preceding syllable” (Rose 2000: 401). Following Rose (2000), we suggest that the generation of the grammatical output satisfying SYLLCON embodies the emergence of the unmarked (McCarthy & Prince 1994) in the source languages.