Syllable



A syllable (Greek: ) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. A syllable is a part of a word, and consists of phones, or phonetic segments. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants).

According to Richard Maledo (2011), a syllable is a phonological organisation that occupies an intermediate level between segmental and non-segmental phonology, between a phoneme and a word, between consonants and vowels and between formation of sounds into words. According to him, a syllable is the basic unit of phonology which without, there will be no course of study. Though, an elusive concept to define, hence, the deviation of generative phonologist from the concept. Although Maledo(2011) gives what may be termed as a working definition of a syllable.

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.

Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur. This shift from pictograms to syllables has been called 'the most important advance in the history of writing'.

A word that consists of a single syllable (like English dog) is called a monosyllable (such a word is monosyllabic), while a word consisting of two syllables (like puppy) is called a disyllable (such a word is disyllabic). A word consisting of three syllables (such as wolverine) is called a trisyllable (the adjective form is trisyllabic). A word consisting of more than three syllables (such as rhinoceros) is called a polysyllable (and could be described as polysyllabic), although this term is often used to describe words of two syllables or more.

In English, syllables can begin or end with consonants or vowels. Other languages sometimes insist that every syllable end in a vowel or begin with a consonant. On the other hand, no known language insists that syllables begin with a vowel or end in a consonant.

In linguistics, basic syllable structure is often listed using abbreviations, where C represents any consonant and V any vowel, for instance:
 * CV - beginning consonant, vowel
 * CV(C) - beginning consonant, vowel, optional closing consonant

An open syllable is one which ends in a vowel. An example in English would be 'boo'.

A closed syllable is one that ends in a consonant. An example in English would be 'bat'.

Syllable structure
In most theories of European phonology, the general structure of a syllable (σ) consists of three segments: In traditional Asian phonology, nucleus and coda are not distinguished, but in some theories the onset is further analysed: Although every syllable has supra-segmental features, these are usually ignored if not semantically relevant, e.g. in tonal languages.
 * 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
 * Rime (ρ): usually contrasted with onset
 * Initial (ι): often termed onset, but leaving out semi-vowels
 * Medial (μ): glide between initial and rime
 * Final (φ): contrasted with initial
 * 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.

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. 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 "fire", / "tuna".)

This means that the difference between a syllable with a null onset and one with 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 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 "he asked",  "opinion",  "light"), but it occurs in alternations that are clearly indicative of its phonemic status (cf. Classical  "writer" vs. /mak "written",  "eater" vs.  "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, , , or , 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 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 can't be divided into separately pronounceable syllables: neither  nor  is a possible independent syllable, and likewise with the other short vowels. 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. (See English phonology.)

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 ( in modern reconstructions, in older versions), and many reconstructions of Middle Chinese include a medial contrast between  and, where the  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, , and. 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.

Syllable weight
A heavy syllable is one with a branching rime or branching nucleus – this is a metaphor, based on the nucleus or coda having lines that branch in a tree diagram. In some languages, heavy syllables include both VV (branching nucleus) and VC (branching rime) syllables, contrasted with V, which is a light syllable. (A "branching nucleus" is a long vowel or diphthong. A "branching rime" is a rime where the syllable ends in a consonant, also known as a closed syllable; generally, this means that either the nucleus is followed by two consonants or by a single, final consonant.) In other languages, only VV syllables are heavy, while both VC and V syllables are light. Some languages distinguish a third type of superheavy syllable, which consists of VVC syllables (with both a branching nucleus and rime) and/or VCC syllables (with a coda consisting of two or more consonants). In moraic theory, heavy syllables are said to have two moras, while light syllables are said to have one and superheavy syllables are said to have three. Japanese is generally described this way.

Many languages forbid superheavy syllables, while a significant number forbid any heavy syllable. Some languages strive for consonant syllable weight; for example, in stressed, non-final syllables in Italian, short vowels co-occur with closed syllables while long vowels co-occur with open syllables, so that all such syllables are heavy (not light or superheavy).

The difference between heavy and light frequently determines which syllables receive stress – this is the case in Latin and Arabic, for example. The system of poetic meter in many classical languages, such as Classical Greek, Classical Latin and Sanskrit, is based on syllable weight rather than stress (so-called quantitative rhythm or quantitative meter).

A classical definition
Guilhem Molinier, a member of the Consistori del Gay Saber, which was the first literary academy in the world and held the Floral Games to award the best troubadour with the violeta d'aur top prize, gave a definition of the syllable in his Leys d'amor (1328–1337), a book aimed at regulating the then flourishing Occitan poetry:

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:
 * Stress
 * Tone

Sometimes syllable length is also counted as a suprasegmental feature; for example, in some 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). Many other languages are much more restricted; Japanese, for example, only allows and a chroneme in a coda, and theoretically has no consonant clusters at all, as the onset is composed of at most one consonant.

There are languages that forbid empty onsets, such as Hebrew and Arabic (the names transliterated as "Israel", "Abraham", "Omar", "Ali" and "Abdullah", among many others, actually begin with semiconsonantic glides or with glottal or pharyngeal consonants). Conversely, some analyses of the Arrernte language of central Australia posit that no onsets are permitted at all in that language, all syllables being underlyingly of the shape VC(C).

Syllabification
Syllabification is the separation of a word into syllables, whether spoken or written. In most languages, the actually spoken syllables are the basis of syllabification in writing too. Due to the very weak correspondence between sounds and letters in the spelling of modern English, for example, written syllabification in English has to be based mostly on etymological i.e. morphological instead of phonetic principles. English "written" syllables therefore do not correspond to the actually spoken syllables of the living language.

(Syllabification may also refer to the process of a consonant becoming a syllable nucleus.)

Syllable division and ambisyllabicity
Most commonly, a single consonant between vowels is grouped with the following syllable (i.e. ), while two consonants between vowels are split between syllables (i.e. ). In some languages, however, such as Old Church Slavonic, any group of consonants that can occur at the beginning of a word is grouped with the following syllable; hence, a word such as pazdva would be syllabified. (This allows the phonotactics of the language to be defined as requiring open syllables.) Contrarily, in some languages, any group of consonants that can occur at the end of a word is grouped with the following syllable.

In English, it has been disputed whether certain consonants occurring between vowels (especially following a stressed syllable and preceding an unstressed syllable) should be grouped with the preceding or following syllable. For example, a word such as better is sometimes analyzed as and sometimes. Some linguists have in fact asserted that such words are "ambisyllabic", with the consonant shared between the preceding and following syllables. However, Wells (2002) argues that this is not a useful analysis, and that English syllabification is simply.

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 it has at least one of the following: In each case the syllable is considered to have two moras.
 * a long vowel in its nucleus
 * a diphthong in its nucleus
 * one or more coda(e)

Syllables and vowel tenseness
In most Germanic languages, lax vowels can occur only 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 even 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 contain only obstruents:


 * 'you spat on me'
 * 'he arrived'
 * 'he 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 Indlawn Tashlhiyt Berber), Moroccan Arabic (apparently under Berber influence) and Mon-Khmer languages (such as Semai, Temiar, Kammu). Even in English there are a few utterances that have no vowels; for example, shh (meaning "be quiet") and psst (a sound used to attract attention).

Indlawn Tashlhiyt Berber:
 * 'you sprained it and then gave it'
 * 'rot' (imperf.) (Dell & Elmedlaoui 1985, 1988)

Semai:
 * 'short, fat arms' (Sloan 1988)

Sources and recommended reading

 * Clements, George N.; Keyser, Samuel J.. (1983). CV phonology: A generative theory of the syllable. Linguistic inquiry monographs (No. 9). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-53047-3 (pbk); ISBN 0-262-03098-5 (hb)
 * Clements, George N.; Keyser, Samuel J.. (1983). CV phonology: A generative theory of the syllable. Linguistic inquiry monographs (No. 9). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-53047-3 (pbk); ISBN 0-262-03098-5 (hb)