The asymmetrical behaviour of syllabic sonorants in Southern British English

This article presents original acoustic data on syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ in Southern British English and proposes a new phonological account of their behaviour. Previous analyses have proposed that syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ should be represented identically. This paper, however, shows that syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ behave in very different ways, and in light of this, a unitary analysis is not justified. Instead, a proposal is made that syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ have different phonological structures, and that these different phonological structures explain their different phonetic behaviours.