The question of alignment of song and phonological units is very interesting. Consider the theory of 3-D representation (from Halle, Vergnaud, Idsardi, and others), with the X-tier representing the line from which various half-planes radiate; these planes are, for example, the feature tier, the metrical tier (for stress), and so on. Dell's question is whether or not song aligns universally only with representations on the syllable tier. What other paraphonological objects align with these 3-D representations, and with which units? What are the implications of these alignment phenomena for our theories of representation?

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Here are a couple links to my work on Akkadian that provides a counterpoint to Gnanadesikan's presentation at the conference:
http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~bdsamuel/pdfs/akkad-handout.pdf
http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~bdsamuel/pdfs/akkadian.pdf
I also have a copy of Poser's handout that inspired my investigation into Akkadian if anyone is interested, but I don't want to post it here in case it's not ok with him.

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Chuck and I have been discussing the meaning of 'para' in the title of this area and want to make sure that our choice of this term does not negatively influence any thoughts about these sources of data. To speak for both of us (Chuck can correct me if I'm wrong here), we're both very open to the 'methodological anarchism' suggested by Bill Idsardi and consider the sample of diverse sources of observations about syllables represented above as starting points. Thus, our use of 'paraphonological' is more expansive than how the term is used by François Dell in his talk (yes, this site appears to be unicode compliant, ü, ʔ þ ∂ ə, ɠ, etc.). François' use of 'paraphonological' is also more expansive than Bruce Hayes use of the term in his 2002 paper "Faithfulness and Componentiality in Metrics" which references Paul Kiparsky's 1977 LI article "The rhythmic structure of English verse". Both Hayes and Kiparksy use the term 'paraphonological' more narrowly in reference to setting text and meter.

Nomenclature should be helpful in clarifying ideas and not obscuring them. In spirit of this and for better or worse, Chuck and I chose 'paraphonological' as a term to encourage thought about additional sources of data about the syllable. Hopefully, this choice will have the desired effect even though there is overlap in the use of this term.

Eric

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It isn’t always clear what role the syllable plays in regards to deletion; for example, although consonant deletion in Finnish seems teleologically motivated to ensure proper syllabification, it is not the unsyllabified consonant that deletes. E.g., in lapsi ‘child, nom. sg.’, lasta ‘child, part. sg.’ the first of three consonants drops, which is presumably not syllabified. Similarly, the first of two word final consonants drop: paistos ‘pie, nom. sg.’, paistoksen ‘pie, gen. sg.’ This phenomenon can be captured with a nonsyllabic rule that refers to the following environment: ___C{C, #}, but this was recognized as a loss of generalization more than three decades ago.

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