Syllable Syllable Red-Green Alliance Category="Phonology"This article discusses the unit of speech. For the computer operating system, see Syllable (operating system).

A syllable (Ancient Greek: συλλαβή) is a unit of organization for a sequence of Speech sounds. It is typically made up of a Syllable nucleus (most often a Vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants).

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 (like English cat) is called a monosyllable (such a word is monosyllabic), while a word consisting of two syllables (like monkey) is called a disyllable (such a word is disyllabic).

Syllable structure

The general structure of a syllable consists of the following segments:

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In some theories of phonology, these syllable structures are displayed as tree diagrams (similar to the trees found in some types of syntax).

The syllable nucleus is typically a Sonorant, usually a vowel sound, in the form of a Monophthong, Diphthong, or Triphthong, but sometimes including consonants like [l] and [r]. The syllable onset is the sound(s) occurring before the nucleus, and the syllable coda is the sound(s) occurring after the nucleus. A rime consists of a nucleus and a coda.

Generally, every syllable requires a nucleus. A coda-less syllable of the form V, CV, CCV, etc. (i.e. a sequence of any number of consonants + a syllabic sonorant, usually a vowel) is called an open syllable, while a syllable that has a coda (VC, CVC, CVCC, etc.) is called a closed syllable (or checked syllable). All languages allow syllables with empty codas (open syllables).

A heavy syllable is one with a branching rime or a branching nucleus. In some languages, heavy syllables include both CVV (branching nucleus) and CVC (branching rime) syllables. In other languages, only CVV syllables (ones with a long vowel or Diphthong) are heavy, while CVC and CV syllables are light syllables. In moraic theory, heavy syllables are said to have two moras, while light syllables are said to have one.

In some languages, including English, a consonant may be analyzed as acting simultaneously as the coda of one syllable and the onset of the next, a phenomenon known as ambisyllabicity.

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 (as in string or splash), and occasionally end with as many as four (as in prompts or sixths). 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 (the names transliterated as "Israel", "Abraham", "Omar", "Ali" and "Abdullah", among many others, actually begin with semiconsonantic glides or with glottal or pharyngeal consonants).

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: 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 (Bella Coola) words contains only obstruents:
[ɬχʷtɬʦxʷ] 'you spat on me'
[ʦ’ktskʷʦ’] 'he arrived'
[xɬp’χʷɬtɬpɬɬs] 'he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant' (Bagemihl 1991:589, 593, 627)
'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 (such as Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber) and Mon-Khmer languages (such as Semai, Temiar, Kammu).

Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber:

'you sprained it and then gave it'
'rot' (imperf.) (Dell & Elmedlaoui 1985, 1988)

Semai:

'short, fat arms' (Sloan 1988)

See also

External links

References and recommended reading

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