Shanti Úlfsbjörninn discusses
Floating Consonants in French: the need for the skeleton in input (and related issues). The author warns: "this is nothing but an undergraduate essay with a suggestion, not the last word on any particular topic". The suggestion is that we need underlying syllabification in order to understand the behaviour of French liaison consonants as well as the Spanish diminutive. This is a good suggestion, but Úlfsbjörninn assumes that the idea of underlying syllabification is itself new or controversial to OT. I do not think this is true; the real problem is Richness of the Base, which would force us to assume an underlying syllabification /at.a/ for a monomorphemic form; since we would also need faithfulness constraints (if these do not exist, it does not make sense to assume underlying syllable structure in the first place), this would predict that there are languages in which [a.ta] could contrast with [at.a]. "If onsets
always maximise over codas then an intervocal consonant word-medially will always be an onset
(Kager 1999:95). To attribute this consonant to an onset by the use of freely rankable constraints is
redundant and generally flawed as it would be nothing else in the universe anyway." This is not true: it is not redundant, since we will also otherwise need to clarify why some languages need onsets and some (other) languages disallow codas. So the two constraints are
not redundant. However, this universal poses a real puzzle: how can we set up a theory which is strict enough to disallow languages which we know do not exist, while allowing for a natural analysis of facts such as those in French and Spanish.