Phonetically Driven Coda Maximization

Building on the contemporary functional phonology, the present paper posits physical groundings in coda maximization. The four sorts of conditioning consonants that commonly undergo the syllabification stem from the articulations that preferentially affiliate to stressed syllable codas: contact of the tongue for the American English tap, no incompatibility for the British English glottal stop, less articulatory energy for voiceless stops and weak plosion for voiced stops, the latter two of which are categorized into a weakening choice different from consonant lenition. The commonly heterosyllabified examples of coda phonemes (e.g. /ln, lm/) lack a physical conditioning. The ongoing case in American English in which coda maximization has been avoided due to the nasalized tap (i.e. [] → ) is meant to be the shift typical to the variant, and not to be a flaw in the phonetic grounding. Conversely, two sonority-based accounts have flaws.