The Syllable and the Foot : Summary - Speech Resource Pages

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The Syllable: Introduction Felicity Cox, Jonathan Harrington and Robert Mannell Aspects of phonology above the segmental level comprise units of greater length than the segment. These are referred to as suprasegmental features. Suprasegmental aspects of language encode rhythm and melody and thereby contribute to meaning and give a language its characteristic cadence. Suprasegmental constituent structure is considered hierarchical with the phonological phrase ( ) dominating the phonological word ( ) which in turn dominates the foot (F), the superior constituent to the syllable ( ). The syllable is the most basic element in this constituent structure. It has psychological reality as a unit that speakers of a language can identify. Speakers are able to count the number of syllables in a word and can often tell where one syllable ends and the next begins. Phonetically, it is claimed that when identifying syllables, listeners are responding to sonority. Sonority is the relative loudness of a segments compared with others. Each syllable has a single sonority peak. What is a syllable? There is no definition of the syllable that phoneticians or phonologists currently agree upon yet the notion of a unit at a higher level than that of the phoneme has existed since ancient times. The various definitions have a number of commonalities that relate to properties of sound and properties of speakers.
• Sonority or prominence: this is where some sounds are said to have greater prominence than others and these form the basis of syllables. Syllable boundaries fall at points of weak prominence. • Speaker awareness: this relies on the intuition of the speaker to define syllables. People without any linguistic knowledge are capable of dividing words into syllables. Children can clap syllables before they can read. People who have not been exposed to alphabetic writing systems have greater difficulty segmenting utterances into phonemic units than identifying syllables. Many writing systems are syllabic where each symbol represents a syllable. Japanese is an example The CV (consonant followed by vowel) structure has been suggested as a basic phonological unit. What’s the evidence that a CV sequence is a phonological unit? • Almost all languages have CVCV or CV words. • If a language has CCV words, it also has CV words. • Hardly any language has V or VC words without CV ones. One of the rare exception to this is the Arrandic group of Aboriginal languages • The first systematic utterances of children are usually of this form regardless of language type. The syllable is seen as a unit of neural programming rather than primarily muscular or acoustic events. If an error is made in the duration of a phoneme, the error is compensated for within the syllabic unit suggesting that articulatory events are programmed in terms of higher-level articulatory units rather than single phonemes. Other evidence for neural programming comes from speech errors such as slips of the tongue. When spoonerisms occur, for instance, and one consonant is substituted for another, this only occurs in same syllable position. eg initial consonants are swapped for initial consonants and final consonants for final consonants. eg beas and peans, or else whole syllables are switched "drugtator dic Baron". Errors do not involve random switching between segments. The syllable is a structural unit and within that structure we can identify a sequence of consonants (C) and vowels (V). Just as in grammar we can parse a grammatical structure, in phonology we can parse syllabic structure.
Page 1: The Syllable and the Foot Topics Th
Page 5 and 6: get a good idea of what types of sy
Page 7 and 8: The Rhyme The rhyme is the vowel pl
Page 9 and 10: The Syllable and Phonotactic Constr
Page 11 and 12: If they conform to the sonority pro
Page 13 and 14: Finally, there are far fewer restri
Page 15 and 16: eg. /stremp/ in English is an accid
Page 17 and 18: The Foot and Word Stress Word Stres
Page 19 and 20: Building Feet into Words English Wo
Page 21 and 22: The foot is analogous to the bar in
Page 23 and 24: These (H) are non-final heavy rhyme
Page 25 and 26: (3) Associate any weak syllables wi
Page 27 and 28: The Foot and Word Stress Robert Man
Page 29: The Syllable and the Foot : Summary

The Syllable and the Foot : Summary - Speech Resource Pages

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