Contrastive syllabification in Blackfoot

Current phonological theory generally assumes that syllabification is absent from underlying representations because it is never used contrastively among the world’s languages: tautomorphemic contrasts of the type a.ka vs. ak.a or ak.la vs. a.kla have never been convincingly documented (e.g. Blevins 1995, McCarthy 2003). However, it is a matter of debate whether the absence of contrastiv