ABSTRACT
The phonological phenomenon in Bulgarian that argues for the position that the mora is a prosodic licenser is the so-called 'liquid metathesis'. This chapter argues that the lexical component of Bulgarian phonology contains two levels—a cyclic and a postcyclic one. It also argues that moraic structure is the only prosodic structure present through the cyclic lexical component. Syllables are created at the postcyclic lexical level, by a simple mora-to-syllable mapping. This is a one-to-one mapping, since all Bulgarian syllables are monomoraic. It is important to note that the internal constituency of each mora is preserved under this mapping. The evidence for the late creation of syllables comes from the interactions of the cyclic and the postcyclic levels; or more specifically, from the interaction of three lexical rules, one cyclic and two postcyclic. But Epenthesis is also a lexical rule, since its domain of application is the word.
