Syllable

The syllable is a unit of organisation in phonology, the system responsible for the patterns of sounds and signs in language. Typically, a syllable consists of a vowel and at least one consonant, though various combinations are possible, including single vowels. The number and type of syllables in a word, phrase or sentence may strongly influence stress and intonation throughout.

Onset-Nucleus-Coda: one view of the structure of the syllable, showing the syllabification of three words in English, Japanese and Berber.

In linguistics, the existence of syllables as organisers of speech sounds and sign language movements is typically used to explain observations about what is possible in language, from native speakers’ perceptions of how many 'beats' there are in a word to the possible ordering of segments such as c, a and t in cat: why English speakers 'feel' there are two syllables in mother but only one in fire, and why *nxalr is not a possible word in English and, indeed, most languages.

The existence of the syllable as an abstract phonological unit that limits the possible sequences of segments is not uncontroversial, and its use in mainstream linguistics literature has been inconsistent. Theories predating the arrival of the currently-mainstream generative phonology, as well as more recent approaches from within generativism itself, have called into question or even outright rejected the syllable in favour of other behavioural explanations from within both phonology and phonetics.

Evidence for the syllable

Main article: Evidence for the syllable

Evidence for the existence of syllables in the world's languages can be divided into evidence both external and internal to the system of language. The former refers to ideas about syllables in various cultures, such as their use in poetry, as well as speakers' 'intuitions' about them. Internal evidence refers to actual linguistic behaviour (e.g. positions where speakers modify a pronunciation), which can perhaps be better accounted for if it is assumed that 'rules' of phonology operate within the syllable rather than some other domain.

There are several pieces of external evidence for the syllable:

• Its place in various cultures around the world; for instance, there are many writing systems, known as syllabaries, that write syllables rather than individual phonemes (distinctive segments);
• Their use in language games, such as Pig Latin, where syllables are moved around;
• Native speaker intuitions; people often 'feel' that words are not the fundamental unit of speech, but are further divided into smaller units;
• Speech errors and wordplay seem to keep syllables intact; e.g. town drain is a possible spoonerism for down train, but *nown traid is not;
• Typology (language classification according to structure): most languages seem to have syllables, and certain types are particularly common.

Internal evidence involves a more complex analysis of linguistic behaviour. For example, word stress in many languages seems dependent on the number and type of syllables, and the ordering of speech segments tends to group into syllable-like sequences of consonants and vowels, typically CV.

Historical definitions of the syllable

Although humankind has been aware of syllables throughout recorded history, as evidenced by the existence of syllabaries, a formal definition remained elusive until the late 20th century. Sometimes the syllable was defined on loosely phonetic grounds, while on other occasions a more phonological description was sought.

The syllable in phonetics

The structuralist linguist Charles F. Hockett, drawing on the 1947 work of Kenneth and Eunice Pike, referred to the syllable as a "structural unit", analysing it into Immediate Constituents (capitalisation in original) of an onset, a peak and a coda. He went on to claim that their origin was phonetic and pulmonic (of the lungs): it appeared that the rhythm of pulmonic exhalation correlated with the production of syllables. This was a similar view to the idea that syllables were associated with 'chest pulses'.

However, this phonetic definition of the syllable did not adequately describe its behaviour. Whilst phonetic analysis of speech often finds a correlation between breaks in voicing and syllable margins, there are many instances where boundaries are absent from the acoustic waveform. As a result of this lack of correspondence between phonetic observations and phonological operations, a satisfactory acoustic or auditory definition is yet to be found. Furthermore, changes in pronunciation within syllables often seem unmotivated by phonetic factors; for example, English speakers vary a good deal in how much and when they glottalise the phoneme /t/ in words such as hat; this process occurs syllable-finally, but is not obligatory.

The syllable in generative phonology

The 1950s and 1960s saw a new approach to language study: generative linguistics, associated primarily with Noam Chomsky and his contemporaries. This ultimately became the current 'mainstream' of Western linguistic research, leading to theories of both syntax and phonology. Within generative theory, prosodic structure (levels of phonological information, from the segment up to the syllable and the intonation pattern imposed on an utterance) is formed according to the principles of 'Universal Grammar' (UG), which underlie all languages. A speaker of a language possesses some kind of faculty which explicitly sets out what kinds of syllables, patterns of segments and other levels of phonological information are possible, while ruling out those which are not. This, crucially, unfolds in neurologically typical children without instruction, and little influence from the environment around them. For example, children typically produce syllables of consonant-vowel (CV) sequences from their earliest productions. However, this presence of the syllable in first language acquisition did not immediately lead to its recognition as a crucial unit of phonological theory.

The syllable as a segmental rule

By the time of Chomsky and Halle’s Sound Pattern of English (henceforth 'SPE'), the syllable had been abandoned as a formal phonological unit. In SPE the syllable was not explicitly referred to except as the segmental rather than prosodic feature [± syllabic], attached to vowels and syllabic consonants. However, though there was nothing in SPE between the word and the segment, one could infer the existence of the syllable from rules which seemed to take the syllable as their domain of application. For example, a rule in SPE which seems to apply both to word-edges and adjacent consonants becomes suddenly transparent if it is assumed that it activates at the edge of the syllable. An example of this is glottalisation in English, where the /t/ in but, butter and bottle may be glottalized by many speakers. Assuming this occurs at the right edge of the syllable covers what might otherwise be regarded as three separate rules.

In the 1970s, the syllable was reintroduced to generative linguistics as a rule inserting boundaries between segments. The syllable had returned as a formal linguistic reality, but remained tied to the segmental level rather than existing as a separate 'suprasegmental' unit.

The syllable as a suprasegmental

By the 1980s, the theory that the syllable was confined to the segmental tier - i.e. that certain segments such as vowels could be inherently syllabic - had been eroded. Assuming the syllable to be suprasegmental allowed for a more productive description of permissible segmental ordering.

References

• Bell A & Hooper JB (1978) Issues and evidence in syllabic phonology. In Bell A & Hooper JB (eds) Syllables and Segments. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company. pp.3-22.
• Chomsky N & Halle M (1968) The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.
• Fischer-Jørgensen E (1975) Trends in Phonological Theory: a Historical Introduction. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
• Fujimura O & Erickson D (1997) Acoustic phonetics. In Hardcastle WJ and Laver J (eds) The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences. Oxford: Blackwell. pp.65-115.
• Hockett CF (1955) A Manual of Phonology: Memoir 11. Baltimore, MD: Waverly Press, Inc.
• Hockett CF (1958) A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York: Macmillan.
• Hooper JB (1972) 'The syllable in phonological theory.' Language 48: 525-540.
• Laver J (1994) Principles of Phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Pike KL & Pike E (1947) 'Immediate Constituents of Mazateco syllables.' International Journal of American Linguistics 13: 78-91.
• Selkirk EO (1984a). Phonology and Syntax: the Relation between Sound and Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Selkirk EO (1984b) On the major class features and syllable theory. In Aronoff M & Oerhle RT (eds) Language Sound Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp.107-136.
• van der Hulst H & Ritter NA (1999) Theories of the syllable. In van der Hulst H & Ritter NA (eds) The Syllable: Views and Facts. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp.13-52.

See also

• Linguistics
• Phonology