The shift away from the marked: Syllabic consonants in historical Czech

This paper analyzes the process of resyllabification in historical Czech. We argue that the diachronic shift from non-syllabic liquids to syllabic consonants reflects a broader cross-linguistic pattern of phonological change, characterized by a move away from marked structures. Resyllabification is examined in verse texts from the 14th to the 16th centuries that adhere to a regular octosyllabic rhythm. Our corpus-based research reveals that this process is influenced by morphological structure, with word-medial liquids becoming syllabic before those in word-final and morpheme-final positions. We explain this two-step change as a shift along the licensing hierarchy, from more marked to less marked licensors.