Syllable structure and syllabically-driven phenomena (original) (raw)
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Language, 2000
Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, op gezag van de Rector Magnificus Dr. W.A. Wagenaar, hoogleraar in de faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen, volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties te verdedigen op donderdag 10 september 1998 te klokke 16.15 uur door Robertus Wilhelmus Nicolaas Goedemans geboren te Haarlem in 1967 1 Rhymes and moras, which will be introduced later, are even smaller prosodic units. Rhymes will be argued later to replace the syllable as the prosodic unit that is the domain in certain phonological processes, and moras do not dominate strings of segments but rather single segments. However, see van Heuven (1994) on the possibility of single segments acting as prosodic domains in general. * Using this kind of structure meant that he could refer to the syllable as a unit, while in the same effort resolving the, at that time still troublesome, ambisyllabicity problem. This problem involves segments that phonologically belong to the two syllables between which they are CHAPTER 1 6 4 The bars over some of the vowels in (4) indicate length. phonotactic co-occurrence restrictions between them that do not hold between the other subsyllabic parts. A notorious example of such a restriction is the impossibility of the sequence "long vowel-velar nasal". Combinations like [o ], [i ] and [a ] are ill-formed in a large number of languages. Another argument for the constituency of nucleus and coda is of a more phonetic nature. A long history of experiments shows that there is a temporal relation between a vowel and a following consonant in a large number of languages (cf. Peterson & Lehiste 1960; Chen 1970). The experiments reveal some sort of "trade-off " relation between the nucleus and the coda, but not between the nucleus and the onset. For instance, long vowels are often followed by short consonants and short vowels by long consonants, and voiced consonants are preceded by longer vowels than voiceless consonants (cf. English bed vs. bet). These observations show that the durations of the nucleus and coda are interrelated. Following Lehiste's (1971) assumption that such temporal relationships between two segments reflect programming as a unit at some higher level, we insert a node called the rhyme under the syllable node (cf. Fudge 1969; Selkirk 1978). This new node dominates the nucleus and the coda, which results in the syllabic structure presented in (3). (3) σ Onset Rhyme Nucleus Coda st a nd Not only does this rhyme unit indicate which group of segments must be identical when we create two rhyming lines of a poem, it is also very useful in many phonological rules. An example of such a rule is provided by Lass (1984). He states that, in Old English noun declensions, the onset-rhyme division is needed to account for the presence of a suffix. Let us look at some of Lass' data. 4 (4) a. Neuter a-stem, nom pl : col-u 'coals' word 'words' lim-u 'limbs' wīf 'women' 1.2.1 Stress: an introduction to the phenomenon Sweet (1902:47) defines force (or stress) by the effort with which breath is expelled from the lungs. He identifies 'loudness' as the acoustic correlate of stress. There is a, perhaps not so obvious, discrepancy between Sweet's definition of stress and his acoustic correlate. The effort with which breath is expelled is definitely speaker oriented, while loudness is a perceptually (read 'for the listener') defined property of speech that is correlated with the intensity of the speech signal. 5 This is probably what Jones (1950) had in mind when he introduced the distinction between stress (speaker activity) and prominence (effect perceived by the listener). 1 The experiments reported on in this chapter have been published in Goedemans & van Heuven (1993).
The role of the syllable in the organization and realization of sound systems
2011
1 Preliminaries Theories of phonology include an inventory of basic elements, such as segments, tones, stress, features, and gestures, and a model that accounts for their distribution and realization. The phonological context is taken to be organized into higher-order prosodic constituents, which structure and constrain the realization of phonological elements. Moving from elements to their distribution, this section addresses issues pertaining to the syllable as an organizing constituent of phonological units, bridging between the coordination of articulatory events (**Gafos & Goldstein, this chapter**) and prosodic structure (**Turk, this chapter, and chapter 11**). A large range of approaches to the syllable have been offered, varying in their level of abstractness and supported by an impressive variety of experimental results. Despite the richness and sophistication of this body of research and the intuitive attractiveness of the syllable, the syllabic domain remains difficult t...
Alternatives to syllable-based accounts of consonantal phonotactics
1999
Phonotactic statements characterize contextual restrictions on the occurrence of segments or feature values. This study argues that consonantal phonotactics are best understood as syllable-independent, string-based conditions reflecting positional differences in the ...
The Syllable in Phonological and Prosodic Structure
2011
Although in some languages there are phonological distinctions between syllabic and nonsyllabic segments, and between accented and unaccented segments. There is reason to believe that neither syllables nor accent-groups (measures) are present in the phonological representations of words in permanent memory. Syllables and other prosodic structures are characteristically predictable from segmental phonological representation and grammatical boundaries. They are, therefore, nondistinctive. Like other derivative, nondistinctive characteristics of speech, they are less readily “available to consciousness” (Sapir, 1921) than basic, distinctive characteristics. And, unlike phonological segments, they are rarely accurately reflected in writing systems, either in so-called syllabic orthographies like kana and devanagari, or in di-vi-sions of words in alphabetic orthographies. For these reasons we assume that the prosodic organization of segments into syllables and syllables into measures ari...
Syllable Structure and the Distribution of Phonemes in English Syllables
Journal of Memory and Language, 1997
In describing the phonotactics (patterning of phonemes) of English syllables, linguists have focused on absolute restrictions concerning which phonemes may occupy which slots of the syllable. To determine whether probabilistic patterns also exist, we analyzed the distributions of phonemes in a reasonably comprehensive list of uninflected English CVC (consonant-vowelconsonant) words, some 2001 words in all. The results showed that there is a significant connection between the vowel and the following consonant (coda), with certain vowel-coda combinations being more frequent than expected by chance. In contrast, we did not find significant associations between the initial consonant (onset) and the vowel. These findings support the idea that English CVC syllables are composed of an onset and a vowel-coda rime. Implications for lexical processing are discussed. ᭧ 1997 Academic Press
2012
There is no simple discovery procedure for determining phonological syllable structure (which, like phonological representations in general, may not be in a one-to-one relationship with systematic phonetic syllabification, and which may not necessarily conform to native speaker intuitions about syllable division). The nature of the mechanism which assigns syllabification (defines possible syllables) for a given language is an empirical hypothesis, whose confirmation depends on the extent to which linguistically significant generalizations can be expressed under it (Feinstein 1979: 255).
Approaches to the syllable: an assessment
Linguistica
In this paper, which looks back at some of the principal ways of viewing the syllable that have been proposed and attempts to assess their relative validity, I will firstly refer to evidence for the existence of the syllable and lend support to the argument that the syllable must be part of speakers’ phonological knowledge because, not only can they count syllables, but they also know what sound sequences are permissible in them in their native language. Moreover, in this same vein I will also recall the fact that the syllable is the domain of many phonological processes (in English, note aspiration and the glottalling, tapping and rhotacization of [t], for example). Finally, I will defend the analysis of English syllabification proposed by Wells in the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary over and against other traditional linear models and the more abstract nonlinear models, while recognizing that Wells’ hypothesis still leaves unresolved some issues involving the presence/absence of ...