The Syllable and the Foot : Summary - Speech Resource Pages

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fl/+ vowel/ /vowel + /lf/ iː fleece * ɪ flip sylph ʉ flew * e fled self eɪ flake * əʉ flown * ɔ flop golf ɐ flood gulf oː floor * æ flack Ralph æɔ flounce * ɑe fly * * means -- no word with this combination Evidence for the rhyme: sound change A vowel and consonant in the rhyme are often merged historically resulting in a long vowel (known as compensatory lengthening). This kind of merger hardly ever happens in a CV onset-rhyme.
The Syllable and Phonotactic Constraints Jonathan Harrington and Felicity Cox Phonotactic Constraints We have seen in the preceding section that all languages build their words from a finite set of phonemic units. It is also true that in all languages there are constraints on the way in which these phonemes can be arranged to form syllables. These constraints are sometimes known as phonotactic or phoneme sequence constraints and they severely limit the number of syllables that would be theoretically possible if phonemes could be combined in an unconstrained way. Some simple examples of phonotactic constraints in English include: all three-consonant clusters at the beginning of a word start with /s/ ('sprint', 'squire', 'stew' etc); nasal consonants cannot occur as the second consonant in wordinitial consonant clusters unless the first consonant is /s/ (e.g. there are no words in English than begin with /bm dn/ etc), although this is certainly possible in other languages (e.g. German which allows /kn/ in words like 'Knoten', meaning 'knot' - we can see from the spelling that English used to allow this sequence as well). Another important point about phonotactic constraints is that they vary from language to language, as this example of English and German has just shown. We will consider firstly why languages have phonotactic constraints. The main reason is to do with the limits on the talker's ability to pronounce sequences of sounds as one syllable, and the listener's perception of how many syllables he or she hears from a given sequence of phonemes. Consider for example a sequence like /pʁ/ i.e. a voiceless bilabial followed by a voiced uvular fricative. Most of us with some training can produce this sequence (e.g. /pʁa pʁit/ etc.) as a monosyllabic word even though it doesn't occur in English. Now try reversing the order of the cluster. With some phonetics training, you could almost certainly produce /ʁp/, but what is much harder (even for a trained phonetician) is to produce the sequence before a vowel such that the resulting sequence is monosyllabic. For example, try /ʁpi/ -- even your best attempts at producing the /ʁ/ followed by the /p/ will probably still lead to a percept of two syllables when /ʁp/ precedes a vowel.
Page 1 and 2: The Syllable and the Foot Topics Th
Page 3 and 4: • Sonority or prominence: this is
Page 5 and 6: get a good idea of what types of sy
Page 7: The Rhyme The rhyme is the vowel pl
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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