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Xabier Artiagoitia Beaskoetxea 
Junko Itô has proposed a view of syllabification as continuous template matching constrained by the general principles of Prosodic Theory and Lexical Phonology; this view, she claims, is empirically and theoretically superior to rule-based approaches. In this paper, Itô's conception of syllabification is applied to the study of the syllable structure of modern Basque and Proto-Basque. The conclusion is drawn that whereas modern Basque has a CCVC syllable template with a Left-to-Right setting of the directionality parameter, Proto-Basque had a CVC template with a Right-to-Left setting. The apparently paradoxical changes that Latin loanwords undergo in Basque (word-initial prothesis and the different treatment of muta-cum-liquida consonant clusters for example) are accounted for by Itô's approach with the additional (and widely accepted) assumption that phonetic trills are underlyingly geminate flaps. Finally, the possibility of an intermediate stage with a CVC template but a Left-to-Right directionality is suggested.
