Predicting Indo-European Syllabification through Phonotactic Analysis

In this paper I begin with a reexamination of the laryngeal loss rule CHCC> CCC, subsequently refining Hackstein’s 2002 formulation. This will lead into a general discussion of the methodology one needs to deduce PIE syllabification and what such rules of syllabification may be able to tell us about the PIE phonology in general. These rules will allow us to formulate a PIE maximum syllable template, which I argue to be the driving force behind at least four major phonological processes in PIE: the metron rule, CHCC > CCC, schwa secundum and vowel epenthesis in the cluster CHC(C).