what is a syllable?

Syllable

A.    Definition of Syllable

The syllable is a well-recognized unit in linguistic analysis which explains quite well the number of rhythmic units that will be perceived in a word or longer utterance. This number is usually equal to the number of vowels in the utterance. Although it is usually easy to get agreement on the number of syllables present in a word, intuitions sometimes differ over where the boundaries between one syllable and another should be placed. Despite such hesitation, the syllable has proven to be a very useful concept in discussing the general rules for distribution of sounds in languages.

Where listeners differ in syllabifying particular words, it is generally the case that both possible syllabifications can be shown to be permitted ones since unambiguous cases of each type can be found. For example, an English word such as pastry might be syllabified by different speakers as past.ry or as pas.try (where the dot represents a division between syllables). Since both paste and tree are perfectly acceptable monosyllabic words of English, either division will agree with a broader rule concerning possible syllables of English.

The broadest rules of this kind for any given language describe what is called the canonical syllable pattern of the language. This is the pattern which essentially characterizes how many consonants may occur before the vowel in a syllable, and how many after the vowel. A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. According  to David Chrystal in his book A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics

syllable (n.) (syll) A unit of pronunciation typically larger than a single sound and smaller than a word. A word may be pronounced ‘syllable at a time’, as in ne-ver-the-less, and a good dictionary will indicate where these syllabic divisions occur in writing, thus providing information about how a word may be hyphenated. The notion of syllable, in short, is very real to native-speakers, and is often used in a quasi-technical sense in everyday conversation (e.g. Shall I put it in words of one syllable?).

Based on Merriam Webster dictionary syllable are ;

 a unit of spoken language that is next bigger than a speech sound and consists of one or more vowel sounds alone or of a syllabic consonant alone or of either with one or more consonant sounds preceding or following

one or more letters (as syl, la, and ble) in a word (as syl*la*ble) usually set off from the rest of the word by a centered dot or a hyphen and roughly corresponding to the syllables of spoken language and treated as helps to pronunciation or as guides to placing hyphens at the end of a line .

A syllable is a unit of pronunciation uttered without interruption, loosely, a single sound. All words are made from at least one syllable. Monosyllables have only one vowel sound; polysyllables have more than one. If a syllable ends with a consonant, it is called a closed syllable. If a syllable ends with a vowel, it is called an open syllable. Patterns of syllables can be shown with C and V (C for 'consonant', V for 'vowel'). Closed syllables are shown as CVC, open syllables CV. Some languages like English have many kinds of closed syllables. Some languages like Japanese have few kinds of closed syllables.

B.     Kind of Syllable

There are six different kinds of syllables in English:

1. Closed Syllables: A closed syllable has one and only one vowel, and it ends in a consonant.

Examples include in, ask, truck, sock, stretch, twelfth, and on.

2. Open Syllables: An open syllable has one and only one vowel, and that vowel occurs at the end of the syllable.

Examples include no, she, I, a, and spry.

3. Silent-E Syllables: A silent-e syllable ends in an e, has one and only one consonant before that e, and has one and only one vowel before that consonant.

Examples include ate, ice, tune, slope, strobe, and these.

4. Vowel Combination Syllables: A vowel combination syllable has a cluster of two or three vowels or a vowel-consonant unit with a sound or sounds particular to that unit.

Examples include rain, day, see, veil, pie, piece, noise, toy, cue, and true.

5. Vowel-R Syllables: A vowel-r syllable is one which includes one and only one vowel followed by an r, or one vowel followed by an r which is followed by a silent e, or a vowel combination followed by an r.

Examples include car, or, care, ire, air, and deer.

6. Consonant-L-E Syllables: In these syllables, a consonant is followed by le. The vowel sound in these syllables is the schwa sound that occurs before the l.

 Examples include -ble, -cle, -dle, -fle, and -gle.

C.    Syllable structure

Three representation of a syllable. In most theories of phonology, the general structure of a syllable (σ) consists of three segments:

·         Onset (ω)

consonant, obligatory in some languages, optional or even restricted in others

·         Nucleus (ν)

sonant, obligatory in most languages

·         Coda (κ)

consonant, optional in some languages, highly restricted or prohibited in others

The syllable is usually considered right-branching, i.e. nucleus and coda are grouped together as a "rime" and are only distinguished at the second level. However, in some traditional descriptions of certain languages, the syllable is considered left-branching, i.e. onset and nucleus group below a higher-level unit, called a "body" or "core":

·         Rime (ρ)

right branch, contrasts with onset, splits into nucleus and coda

·         Body or core

left branch, contrasts with coda, splits into onset and nucleus

In some theories the onset is strictly consonantal, thus necessitating another segment before the nucleus:

·         Initial (ι)

often termed onset, but leaving out semi-vowels

·         Medial (μ)

glide between initial, if any, and nucleus or rime

·         Final (φ)

contrasts with initial, extended rime

Although every syllable has supra-segmental features, these are usually ignored if not semantically relevant, e.g. in tonal languages.

·         Tone (τ)

may be carried by the syllable as a whole or by the rime

In some theories of phonology, these syllable structures are displayed as tree diagrams (similar to the trees found in some types of syntax). Not all phonologists agree that syllables have internal structure; in fact, some phonologists doubt the existence of the syllable as a theoretical entity.^[2]

The nucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable. The onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and the coda (literally 'tail') is the sound or sounds that follow the nucleus. They are sometimes collectively known as the shell. The term rime covers the nucleus plus coda. In the one-syllable English word cat, the nucleus is a (the sound that can be shouted or sung on its own), the onset c, the coda t, and the rime at. This syllable can be abstracted as a consonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviated CVC. Languages vary greatly in the restrictions on the sounds making up the onset, nucleus and coda of a syllable, according to what is termed a language's phonotactics.

·         Onset

Most syllables have an onset. Some languages restrict onsets to be only a single consonant, while others allow multiconsonant onsets according to various rules. For example, in English, onsets such as pr-, pl- and tr- are possible but tl- is not (except very marginally in foreign words such as Tlingit), and sk- is possible but ks- is not. In Greek, however, both ks- and tl- are possible onsets, while contrarily in Classical Arabic no multiconsonant onsets are allowed at all.

Some languages require all syllables to have an onset; in these languages a null onset such as in the English word "at" is not possible. This is less strange than it may appear at first, as most such languages allow syllables to begin with a phonemic glottal stop (the sound in the middle of English "uh-oh"). Furthermore, in English and most other languages, a word that begins with a vowel is automatically pronounced with an initial glottal stop when following a pause, whether or not a glottal stop occurs as a phoneme in the language.

 Consequently, few languages make a phonemic distinction between a word beginning with a vowel and a word beginning with a glottal stop followed by a vowel, since the distinction will generally only be audible following another word. (However, Hawaiian and a number of other Polynesian languages do make such a distinction; cf. Hawaiian /ahi/ "fire", /ʔahi/ "tuna".)

This means that the difference between a syllable with a null onset and one beginning with a glottal stop is often purely a difference of phonological analysis, rather than the actual pronunciation of the syllable. In some cases, the pronunciation of a (putatively) vowel-initial word when following another word – particularly, whether or not a glottal stop is inserted – indicates whether the word should be considered to have a null onset. For example, many Romance languages such as Spanish never insert such a glottal stop, while English does so only some of the time, depending on factors such as conversation speed; in both cases, this suggests that the words in question are truly vowel-initial.

 But there are exceptions here, too. For example, German and Arabic both require that a glottal stop be inserted between a word and a following, putatively vowel-initial word. Yet such words are said to begin with a vowel in German but a glottal stop in Arabic. The reason for this has to do with other properties of the two languages. For example, a glottal stop does not occur in other situations in German, e.g. before a consonant or at the end of word. On the other hand, in Arabic, not only does a glottal stop occur in such situations (e.g. Classical /saʔala/ "he asked", /raʔj/ "opinion", /dˤawʔ/ "light"), but it occurs in alternations that are clearly indicative of its phonemic status (cf. Classical /kaːtib/ "writer" vs. /maktuːb/ "written", /ʔaːkil/ "eater" vs. /maʔkuːl/ "eaten").

The writing system of a language may not correspond with the phonological analysis of the language in terms of its handling of (potentially) null onsets. For example, in some languages written in the Latin alphabet, an initial glottal stop is left unwritten; on the other hand, some languages written using non-Latin alphabets such as abjads and abugidas have a special zero consonant to represent a null onset.

 As an example, in Hangul, the alphabet of the Korean language, a null onset is represented with ㅇ at the left or top section of a graph, as in 역 "station", pronounced yeok, where the diphthong yeo is the nucleus and k is the coda.

·         Nucleus

Generally, every syllable requires a nucleus (sometimes called the peak), and the minimal syllable consists only of a nucleus, as in the English words "eye" or "owe". The syllable nucleus is usually a vowel, in the form of a monophthong, diphthong, or triphthong, but sometimes is a syllabic consonant. By far the most common syllabic consonants are sonorants like [l], [r], [m], [n] or [ŋ], but a few languages have so-called syllabic fricatives, also known as fricative vowels. (In the context of Chinese phonology, the related but non-synonymous term apical vowel is commonly used.) Mandarin Chinese is famous for having such sounds in at least some of its dialects, for example the pinyin syllables sī shī rī, sometimes pronounced [sź̩ ʂʐ̩́ ʐʐ̩́] respectively.

A few languages, such as Nuxalk (Bella Coola), even allow stop consonants and voiceless fricatives as syllabic nuclei. However, linguists have analyzed this situation in various ways, some arguing that such syllables have no nucleus at all, and some arguing that the concept of "syllable" cannot clearly be applied at all to these languages. See the discussion below concerning syllable-less languages.

·         Coda

A coda-less syllable of the form V, CV, CCV, etc. is called an open syllable (or free syllable), while a syllable that has a coda (VC, CVC, CVCC, etc.) is called a closed syllable (or checked syllable). Note that they have nothing to do with open and close vowels. Almost all languages allow open syllables, but some, such as Hawaiian, do not have closed syllables.

In English, consonants have been analyzed as acting simultaneously as the coda of one syllable and the onset of the following syllable, as in 'bellow' bel-low, a phenomenon known as ambisyllabicity. It is argued that words such as arrow /ˈæroʊ/ can't be divided into separately pronounceable syllables: neither /æ/ nor /ær/ is a possible independent syllable, and likewise with the other short vowels /ɛ ɪ ɒ ʌ ʊ/. However, Wells (1990) argues against ambisyllabicity in English, positing that consonants and consonant clusters are codas when after a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, or after a full vowel and followed by a reduced syllable, and are onsets in other contexts.

Rhyme

·         Medial and final

In the phonology of some East Asian languages, especially Chinese, the syllable structure is expanded to include an additional, optional segment known as a medial, which is located between the onset (often termed the initial in this context) and the rime. The medial is normally a glide consonant, but reconstructions of Old Chinese generally include liquid medials (/r/ in modern reconstructions, /l/ in older versions), and many reconstructions of Middle Chinese include a medial contrast between /i/ and /j/, where the /i/ functions phonologically as a glide rather than as part of the nucleus.

 In addition, many reconstructions of both Old and Middle Chinese include complex medials such as /rj/, /ji/, /jw/ and /jwi/. The medial groups phonologically with the rime rather than the onset, and the combination of medial and rime is collectively known as the final.

·         Tone

In most languages, the pitch or pitch contour in which a syllable is pronounced conveys shades of meaning such as emphasis or surprise, or distinguishes a statement from a question. In tonal languages, however, the pitch of a word affects the basic lexical meaning (e.g "cat" vs. "dog") or grammatical meaning (e.g. past vs. present). In some languages, only the pitch itself (e.g. high vs. low) has this effect, while in others, especially East Asian languages such as Chinese, Thai or Vietnamese, the shape or contour (e.g. level vs. rising vs. falling) also needs to be distinguished

References

Crystal, David, 1985, A Dictionary of Linguistic and Phonetics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Booij, Geert, 2007, The Grammar of Words: An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Stump, Gregory T, 2001, Inflectional Morphology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Shibatani, Masayoshi, 1987. "Japanese". In Bernard Comrie. The World's Major Languages. Oxford University Press.

Balthasar Bickel & Johanna Nichols, Inflectional morphology, University of California, Berkeley

The concise Oxford dictionary

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