Summary

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). Syllable can be defined as a complex unit made up of nuclear and marginal elements, with vowels acting as nuclear, syllabic elements and consonants as marginal, or non-syllabic ones.

There have been attempts to describe it as a minimal articulatory unit in terms of 'chest-pulse' theory by R.H. Stetson, sonority theory by Otto Jespersen, as an arc of muscular tension by L.V Scherba or, perceptually, an arc of loudness by N.I. Zhinkin. Syllable is also a minimal prosodic unit in which prosodic features of pitch, length and loudness may be realized.

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. Syllables can be open, when ending in a vowel (V, CV), closed, ending in a consonant (VC, CVC), covered, with a consonant for an onset (CV, CVC), uncovered, with no onset (V, VC), light, with a short vowel like [з] or [i] or [u] and no consonant to follow, and heavy, with a long vowel or a diphthong, or a short vowel with a consonant to follow. Heavy syllables attract stress, they become stressed, while light syllables are unstressed.

The syllable is operational in all languages, it is a universal phenomenon. Specific rules for syllable structure vary in accordance with the phonotactic constraints of a particular language.

There is an overall tendency towards open syllables: CV structure with a single onset consonant followed by a vowel is basic for human language. The next common tendency is: sequences of segments are syllabified in accordance with a sonority scale. Applied to syllable struclure, the idea is that the most sonorous element will be located within the nucleus, and that the further one gets from the nucleus, the less sonorous are the segments. Another universal principle of syllabification concerns the syllabification of polysyllabic words, and is referred to as the principle of Maximal Onset: more consonants are clustered at the onset position than in coda. Most languages prefer filled rather than empty onsets, onsets are more salient than codas perceptually. In a polysyllabic word consonants at the syllable boundary are more likely to be attached to the following syllable.

Languages differ in syllable structures they allow, in terms of how many consonants can begin or end a syllable, whether vowels can begin syllables, and whether both open and closed syllables are possible. English and Russian have almost an equal number of syllable models: 23 vs. 21. The maximal number of consonants in an English onset is three, as in splash and the Russian syllable onset may have four: всплакнуть. In coda the number is reversed: the maximum for the Russian language is three, while English coda composed of root + affixes may have as many as four consonants. The basic difference between English and Russian consists in the dominance of an open syllable in Russian (CV), and a closed syllable in English (CVC). Another specific English feature is that approximants /1, m, n, r/ may become syllabic after a consonant, which can be accounted for by sonority rule: rhyth-m. An important point of difference in syllable formation is that in Russian there is a close contact between the onset consonants and the following vowels (CV), which affects the quality of vowels. In English, like in all Germanic languages, there is a close contact between the vowel and the coda consonants (VC), which affects the length of vowels. Positional length of vowels, which is present in all English dialects but which is particularly important for GA and Scottish Standard English, determines vowel duration in English.

Syllable division is a controversial point. Two authoritative sources, LPD and EPD dictionaries, follow different principles in attaching a single consonant at the syllable boundary either to the first syllable (Maximum Stress): lad-y, or to the second syllable (Maximum Onset): la-dy. Experimental data evidence is that syllable boundary will normally run after a long vowel: la-dy, sai-lor. In case of a short stressed vowel the following consonant joins it to form a closed syllable, and the boundary goes within or after the consonant: pit-y, bett-er.

Compounds should be divided into syllables according to the morphological principle: hard-ware. In all other cases the phonotactic rules of the language are operational: a-pprove, cott-on, litt-le.

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