Syllable as a phonetic and phonological unit

LECTURE 3

SYLLABLE

Syllable as a phonetic and phonological unit.

Structure: universal rules.

Language-specific phonotactics.

Syllable division: experimental data

Syllable as a phonetic and phonological unit

Speech is a continuous flow quantified in certain units, strings of vowels and consonants. Syllable is the minimal grouping of vowels and consonants necessary for articulation (phonetic unit) and for storing strings of phonemes in the mental representation (phonological unit). The syllable is a unit posited at both the phonetic and the phonological levels of analysis.

The notion of a phonetic unit is difficult to define. Most scholars agree that a child can usually count on his/her fingers the number of syllables in a sequence, but no phonetician has succeeded so far in giving an exhaustive and adequate description of what syllable is. There have been attempts to describe it as a minimal articulatory unit in terms of "chest-pulse" theory (R.H. Stetson), sonority theory (O. Jespersen), as an arc of muscular tension (L.V Scherba) or, perceptually, an arc of loudness (N.I. Zhinkin). Syllable is also a minimal prosodic unit in which prosodic features of pitch, length and loudness may be realized.

One of the chief difficulties lies in determining the possible boundaries of such a phonetic unit. For instance, English speakers will agree that the word window has two syllables, although they may not agree on where the syllable boundaries come. It is still more difficult for a non-native speaker to split a word into syllables. A Japanese speaker will claim to hear four syllables in the English word sticks [s-ti-k-s]. Thus what we hear as a sylla­ble may be conditioned by the structure of the language we use.

Syllable as a phonological unit maybe defined as a minimal pattern of phoneme combination with a vowel as nucleus, preceded and followed by a consonant unit or permitted consonant combination. It can also be defined as "a complex unit, made up of nuclear and marginal elements" (Layer 1995), with vowels acting as nuclear, syllabic, elements and conso­nants as marginal, or non-syllabic ones.

The syllable may consist of the onset, the nucleus and the coda. The nucleus plus coda constitute the rhyme. There is no syllable without the nucleus, the presence of the onset and the coda depends on the phonotactic rules of a particular language: there are many languages which demand a consonant in the onset but in Japanese, for example, only one conso­nant is permitted, while in English there may be as many as three, while the Russian language allows of four consonants in that position: splash, straw, screen, but вздрогнуть, встрепенуться, всплеск.

When a syllable ends in a vowel, with no final consonant, it is said to be an open syllable: be [bi:] is an open syllable of CV (consonant + vowel) structure. When the syllable is terminated by a consonant, it is said to be closed: it [it] is a closed syllable of VC (vowel + consonant) structure. We can also distinguish covered (CV) from uncovered (V or VC) syllables, depending on whether they have a consonant in the onset.

If there is a long vowel or a diphthong, or more than one consonant in the rhyme (nucleus + coda), the syllable is called long or heavy. Heavy syllables attract stress in English. The syllables with just a short vowel without a consonant /i, и, э/ are called light or short, and they are normally unstressed. All the four types of syllable can be found in English and in Russian but there are languages which permit only one type of syllable or have other restrictions on syllable structure.

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