ABSTRACT
The special behavior of geminates in Japanese with regard to syllabification is by no means an isolated phenomenon, similar facts are found in many languages. The chapter considers the syllable structure analyses of two other languages, Italian and Finnish. The prosodic principle of Locality requires that the wellformedness of any prosodic constituent be determined locally, without making reference to external information about other structures. This chapter examines what at first glance appears to be a violation of the principle of Locality in syllable theory. It shows that the emerging theory of geminates in nonlinear phonology provides a solution to the problem which respects locality. The solution relies on the fact that the crucial information is expressed as part of wellformedness conditions on syllable representations rather than as part of the structural description of syllable-building rules. The chapter adopts Hayes' (1986) Linking Constraint because it most straightforwardly applies to filters and conditions.
