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On The Syllabification Of /Tl/ Clusters In Spanish, Steve Parker

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

From the introduction, "As is commonly known, permissible word- and syllable-initial consonant clusters in Spanish consist of a stop (p t k b d g) or f followed by one of the two liquids r or l. Of the fourteen theoretically-possible combinations which these groupings yield, two are problematic: tl and dl

"The sequence dl does not occur word-initially and its word-internal attestation is limited to second person plural "familiar" commands such as tomadlo ('drink it'), which are rarely used outside of Spain. In words of this type the syllable break unquestionably occurs between the d and the l; since …