Syllable Structure and the Distribution of Phonemes in English Syllables (original) (raw)
Related papers
Phoneme distribution and syllable structure of entry words in the CMU English Pronouncing Dictionary
Journal of the Korean society of speech sciences, 2016
This study explores the phoneme distribution and syllable structure of entry words in the CMU English Pronouncing Dictionary to provide phoneticians and linguists with fundamental phonetic data on English word components. Entry words in the dictionary file were syllabified using an R script and examined to obtain the following results: First, English words preferred consonants to vowels in their word components. In addition, monophthongs occurred much more frequently than diphthongs. When all consonants were categorized by manner and place, the distribution indicated the frequency order of stops, fricatives, and nasals according to manner and that of alveolars, bilabials and velars according to place. These results were comparable to the results obtained from the Buckeye Corpus (Yang, 2012). Second, from the analysis of syllable structure, two-syllable words were most favored, followed by three-and one-syllable words. Of the words in the dictionary, 92.7% consisted of one, two or three syllables. This result may be related to human memory or decoding time. Third, the English words tended to exhibit discord between onset and coda consonants and between adjacent vowels. Dissimilarity between the last onset and the first coda was found in 93.3% of the syllables, while 91.6% of the adjacent vowels were different. From the results above, the author concludes that an analysis of the phonetic symbols in a dictionary may lead to a deeper understanding of English word structures and components.
On the status of final consonant clusters in English syllables
1984
Linguistic and behavioral evidence suggests that the syllable is composed of two major constituents, an onset and a rime. The onset is the initial consonant or consonant cluster. The rime is the remainder of the syllable, excepting any inflectional endings or appendices. The internal structure of the rime was studied in four experiments. When an obstruent followed the vowel, subjects most readily divided the rime between the vowel and the obstruent. Thus, final consonant clusters beginning with obstruents formed cohesive units. Postvocalic liquids were grouped with the vowel rather than the final consonant. Postvocalic nasals were intermediate. These results are consistent with linguistic notions of a sonority hierarchy, by which classes of consonants differ in their affinity with vowels.
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).
Linguistic Typology, 25(2), 389-400. doi: 10.1515/lingty-2020-2066, 2020
Although this book was published in the "Studies in Laboratory Phonology" series, you will find hardly any laboratory phonology in it. Instead, you will discover plenty of excellent phonological typology intertwined with historical phonologyprobably a much rarer find. Until very recently, phonological typology was only marginally present within mainstream linguistic typology, being barely recognised as a subfield in its own right. The last few years have seen a gradual change: two synthesising volumes, both entitled Phonological Typology, have appeared (Gordon 2016; Hyman and Plank 2018) and the first workshop on this topic was held at ALT 2019 (Grossman and Moran 2019). At that meeting, the very first Greenberg Award (a prize of the Association for Linguistic Typology for outstanding typological dissertations) was given out in phonologyand it went to the thesis on which the present book is based. The task of reviewing the resulting volume is both pleasant and challenging: this open-access volume appears as a new landmark in typological studies on syllable structure and a sine qua non for future research in the field.
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).
1997
A similar point is made about apocope in Lardil by Wilkinson (1986). 1 We might say µ= in such cases. 2 'chicken, nom.sg.' b. /konna/ kon:n 'pig, nom.sg.' c. /tänava/ tänav 'street, nom.sg.' Final consonants are provably extrametrical, so that no form like *kan is admissible as a noun. In Kyoto (Kansai) Japanese, where the one allowed final consonant (N) is fully moraic, content words shaped CV are excluded: all historically monomoraic items have been lengthened (CV > CV:) to conform to the 2 µ limit. A typical variation is reported for Caughnawaga Mohawk in Michelson (1981): verbs must be disyllabic, and undersized collocations of morphemes are expanded by epenthesis. (2) Mohawk Word Minimality a. /k + tats + s/ iktats 'I offer' b. /hs + yaYks + s/ ihsyaYks 'you are cutting' Crucially, Mohawk prosody is insensitive to the light/heavy distinction, so that F is minimally []. 2 Here we sketch the system of available categories and the principles of mapping that accommodate a base to a prosodically specified template. 'syllable' 'light (monomoraic) syllable' µ 'heavy (bimoraic) syllable' µµ 'core syllable' c These elements are well-established outside of morphology. The theory of phonology uncontroversially recognizes the categories 'prosodic word' (Wd) and 'syllable' (). Stress theory provides the categories 'foot' (F), 'light syllable', and 'heavy syllable'. We adopt the traditional moraic terminology: light syllables () contain µ one mora, heavy syllables () two (v. Hyman (1985), Prince (1983) for recent discussion). Studies of µµ syllabification proper have long recognized the centrality of the syllable CV, the 'core syllable' (). We interpret c to include = V in languages which allow optionality of onsets. The prosodic units are arranged hierarchically c 7