Encyclopedia
A
syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of
speech sounds. It is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .
Syllables are often considered the
phonological "building blocks" of
words. They can influence the rhythm of a
language, its prosody, its
poetic meter, its stress patterns, etc.
A word that consists of a single syllable is called a
monosyllable , while a word consisting of two syllables is called a
disyllable . A word consisting of three syllables is called a
trisyllable . A word consisting of more than three syllables is called a
polysyllable , although this term is often used to describe words of two syllables or more.
Syllable structure
The general structure of a syllable consists of the following segments:
In some theories of phonology, these syllable structures are displayed as tree diagrams .
The syllable nucleus is typically a sonorant, usually a vowel sound, in the form of a monophthong, diphthong, or triphthong, but sometimes sonorant consonants like or . The syllable
onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and the syllable
coda is the sound or sounds that follow the nucleus. The term
rime covers the nucleus plus coda. In the one-syllable English word
cat, the nucleus is
a, the onset
c, the coda
t, and the rime
at. This syllable can be abstracted as a
consonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviated
CVC.Generally, every syllable requires a nucleus. Onsets are extremely common, and some languages require all syllables to have an onset. A coda-less syllable of the form V, CV, CCV, etc. is called an
open syllable, while a syllable that has a coda is called a
closed syllable .
All languages allow open syllables, but some such as Hawaiian do not have closed syllables.
A heavy syllable is one with a branching rime
or a branching nucleus — this is a metaphor, based on the nucleus or coda having lines that branch in a tree diagram. In some languages, heavy syllables include both CVV and CVC syllables, contrasted with CV, which is a
light syllable. In other languages, only CVV syllables are heavy, while both CVC and CV syllables are light. The difference between heavy and light frequently determines which syllables receive stress—this is the case in
Latin and
Arabic, for example. In moraic theory, heavy syllables are said to have two moras, while light syllables are said to have one.
Japanese is generally described this way.
In other languages, including
English, a consonant may be analyzed as acting simultaneously as the coda of one syllable and the onset of the following syllable, a phenomenon known as ambisyllabicity. Examples occurring in Received Pronunciation include words such as
arrow ,
error ,
mirror ,
borrow ,
burrow , which can't be divided into separately pronounceable syllables: neither nor is a possible independent syllable, and likewise with the other short vowels .
Syllable structure
The general structure of a syllable consists of the following segments:
In some theories of phonology, these syllable structures are displayed as tree diagrams .
The syllable nucleus is typically a sonorant, usually a vowel sound, in the form of a monophthong, diphthong, or triphthong, but sometimes sonorant consonants like or . The syllable
onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and the syllable
coda is the sound or sounds that follow the nucleus. The term
rime covers the nucleus plus coda. In the one-syllable English word
cat, the nucleus is
a, the onset
c, the coda
t, and the rime
at. This syllable can be abstracted as a
consonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviated
CVC.Generally, every syllable requires a nucleus. Onsets are extremely common, and some languages require all syllables to have an onset. A coda-less syllable of the form V, CV, CCV, etc. is called an
open syllable, while a syllable that has a coda is called a
closed syllable .
All languages allow open syllables, but some such as Hawaiian do not have closed syllables.
A heavy syllable is one with a branching rime
or a branching nucleus — this is a metaphor, based on the nucleus or coda having lines that branch in a tree diagram. In some languages, heavy syllables include both CVV and CVC syllables, contrasted with CV, which is a
light syllable. In other languages, only CVV syllables are heavy, while both CVC and CV syllables are light. The difference between heavy and light frequently determines which syllables receive stress—this is the case in
Latin and
Arabic, for example. In moraic theory, heavy syllables are said to have two moras, while light syllables are said to have one.
Japanese is generally described this way.
In other languages, including
English, a consonant may be analyzed as acting simultaneously as the coda of one syllable and the onset of the following syllable, a phenomenon known as ambisyllabicity. Examples occurring in Received Pronunciation include words such as
arrow ,
error ,
mirror ,
borrow ,
burrow , which can't be divided into separately pronounceable syllables: neither nor is a possible independent syllable, and likewise with the other short vowels .
Syllables and suprasegmentals
The domain of suprasegmental features is the syllable and not a specific sound, that is to say, they affect all the segments of a syllable:
Sometimes syllable length is also counted as a suprasegmental feature; for example, in most Germanic languages, long vowels may only exist with short consonants and vice versa. However, syllables can be analyzed as compositions of long and short phonemes, as in Finnish and Japanese, where consonant gemination and vowel length are independent.
Syllables and phonotactic constraints
Phonotactic rules determine which sounds are allowed or disallowed in each part of the syllable.
English allows very complicated syllables; syllables may begin with up to three consonants , and occasionally end with as many as four . Many other languages are much more restricted;
Japanese, for example, only allows /n/ and a chroneme in a coda, and has no consonant clusters at all, as the onset is composed of at most one consonant.
There are languages that forbid empty onsets,
Hebrew,
Arabic, and many varieties of
German .
Syllabification
Syllables and stress
Syllable structure often interacts with stress. In
Latin, for example, stress is regularly determined by syllable weight, a syllable counting as heavy if has at least one of the following:
- a long vowel in its nucleus
- a diphthong in its nucleus
- one or more coda
In each case the syllable is considered to have two moras.
Syllables and vowel tenseness
In most
Germanic languages, lax vowels can only occur in closed syllables. Therefore, these vowels are also called
checked vowels, as opposed to the tense vowels that are called
free vowels because they can occur in open syllables.
Syllable-less languages
The notion of syllable is challenged by languages that allow long strings of consonants without any intervening vowel or sonorant. Languages of the Northwest coast of North America, including
Salishan and
Wakashan languages, are famous for this. For instance, these Nuxálk words contain only obstruents:
- 'you spat on me'
- 'he arrived'
- 'he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant'
- 'seal blubber'
In Bagemihl's survey of previous analyses, he finds that the word would have been parsed into 0, 2, 3, 5, or 6 syllables depending which analysis is used. One analysis would consider all vowel and consonants segments as syllable nuclei, another would consider only a small subset as nuclei candidates, and another would simply deny the existence of syllables completely.
This type of phenomenon has also been reported in
Berber languages and Mon-Khmer languages . Even in English there are a few utterances that have no vowels; for example,
shh and
psst .
Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber:- 'you sprained it and then gave it'
- 'rot'
Semai:- 'short, fat arms'
See also
- Mora
- List of the longest English words with one syllable
- Phonology
- Pitch accent
- Stress
- Syllabary writing system
- Syllabic consonant
- Syllabification
- Timing
External links
References and recommended reading
.
.
- Sloan, K. . Bare-consonant reduplication: Implications for a prosodic theory of reduplication. In H. Borer , Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 7. Stanford, CA: Stanford Linguistics Association. .
