ABSTRACT
The formation of prosodic constituents is always assumed to follow the prosodic hierarchy (Selkirk 1980, McCarthy and Prince 1986), that is, moras are grouped into syllables and syllables are grouped into feet. Each level of constituent construction follows the markedness conventions for that level. For example, syllabification should always produce syllables with onsets and foot formation (or metrification) should always produce preferred forms of feet. Since constituent construction starts with the mora and builds larger units as it makes its way up the prosodic hierarchy, it is called "bottom-up" construction (Prince and Smolensky 1993). One consequence of bottom-up constituent construction is that metrical structure should not affect syllabification because the former is built upon the latter. In general, this is true since foot structure forms a constituent of either two syllables or one heavy syllable.
