WORD DIVISION AND SYLLABIFICATION IN ENGLISH

In two previous papers (Hladký 1985a, 1985b) the history of word-division principles was followed up to the end of the 19th century. The contemporary usage in American English does not differ substantially from that of the end of the 19th century and is easily recognized from any American dictionary. An important element in modern printing is computerization. A survey of 17 Amer-ican dailies with 400 cases of division in each of them revealed a systematic application of the ssVC rule (according to which a short stressed vowel attracts the following consonant, as in bal-anced, res-urrection, psychol-ogy). There are differences between the dailies, just as there are differences between the diction-aries, in the way some of the boundaries are treated, e.g. diver-ted — divert-ed, Car-ter — Cart-er, perfor-mance — perform-ance, meas-ure — measure. Excep-tionally we may come across a case of unusual division caused by the overlap-ping of several division criteria and not covered by the division program of that time, e.g. rec-alls, ho-wever, keepa-way, 6 o'c-lock. The contemporary British usage may be less uniform than the America