Earticle

The purpose of this paper is to explain English syllabification of intervocalic consonant and ambisyllabicity. There are three ways to explain the intervocalic consonant: basic syllabification, resyllabification, and ambi- syllabicity. The three English phonological processes are reviewed in this paper. It is argued that the l-velarisation, flapping and aspiration phenomena can be explained clearly for the most cases with the concept of ambisyllabicity, and sometimes the notion of foot is needed for explaining some dialectal differences in l-velarisation and aspiration. This paper also shows that prosodic (foot-based) approach without the notion of ambisyllabicity is not superior to ambisyllabicity approach in that the classification of foot is too arbitrary