“What are syllables and how do we determine their boundaries?”;
What are syllables and how do we determine their boundaries?
Syllables, although they can be almost universally identified, have no agreed phonetic definition. The syllable could be said to be the smallest unit of speech. Every word or utterance contains at least one syllable. Syllables can also be objectively divided into sections. They have two parts, the onset and the rhyme. The rhyme is a vowel and any consonants which follow it, while the onset is the consonants which precede the vowel. Within the rhyme there is the nucleus, which are the vowels, and the coda, which are the final consonants. The word ‘owe’ only has a nucleus, and no onset or coda, whereas ‘splint’ has multiple consonants but only one coda and one onset. The English language has complex onsets and coda. Certain other languages only allow one consonant in the onsonant or none in the coda, meaning that all words could end in a vowel.
In some languages like Japanese, it is very simple to identify a syllable’s boundaries as they are marked by a symbol. Objectively, syllables are easy to identify, and the difference will not vary widely. However for people who have been taught in an alphabetic rather than symbolic writing system like English, it can be difficult to look at symbols like segments, as there is no objective phonetic procedure to define the number of syllables.
This can lead to some aberrations from the norm and conflict as to the ‘correct’ number of syllables. In English, the dialect can change the number of syllables in a word due to different pronunciations. An example of this is the word ‘sedentary’, which could have either three or four syllables. Some words like ‘brightening’ seem to lose a syllable at times, yet at others don’t. Certain words, although they have a universal pronunciation, spark debate as to their syllabicity. It is difficult to say whether nasals like the /m/ in ‘communism’ should be counted as a separate syllable or not. This issue also occurs in words like ‘reel’, where a high front vowel is followed by /l/. Words like this contain two syllables but many people would say they contain one. Words ending in /r/ can cause a similar issue. ‘Fire’ can be considered to be two syllables or one with the ame pronunciation. Certain individuals might say that they pronounce ‘hire’ purposefully monosyllabically in order to personally differentiate it from ‘higher’. Another group up for discussion are unstressed high vowels followed by another without an intervening consonant, for example in ‘prettier’. These could be two or three syllables long, but unlike a word like ‘predatory’ it is hard to see which symbol has been omitted.
Despite these irregularities, the majority of words in English are indubitably universal in their number of syllables. Moreover the irregularities are largely in the pronunciation and not the word itself. In order to explain syllables, one must take into account words which can be agreed on while also trying to explain those which cannot. One approach is to define a syllable in terms of its intrinsic sonority. Sonority is a sound’s loudness relative to that of others with the same lenght, stress and pitch. A vowel has higher sonority because of the mouth is generally opened wider. At either end of the spectrum there are low vowels and voiceless sounds, the former having highest and the latter lowest sonority. A possible theory is that syllabicity corresponds to sonority. There is condensation, in that there are clear peaks of sonority, and each syllable peak has much more sonority than the surrounding sounds. This provides some sort of explanation for the words ending like ‘prism’; the peaks of sonority are so similar that they may differ person to person. That said, this thoery cannot account for everything. The word ‘spa’, for example, is clearly one syllable, but has two peaks of sonority. The two words ‘hidden aims’ and ‘hid names’ have the same sonority but different meanings and syllables. Therefore sonority is not satisfactory enough.
Syllables can be instead defined by peaks in prominence. Prominence relies on sonority but also relative stress, length and pitch. The problem with this approach is that there is no set procedure to combine all of the above to form an overall ‘prominence’- therefore it cannot be objective or reliable. One could look at this information and discern that syllables are, theregore, not a property of the sounds themselves, but something created individually by the speaker. The psychologist RH Stetson asserts, in his motor theory, that every syllable is initiated by a chest pulse. However this theory lacks substantial evidence and iclearly cannot account for everything.
JC Catford suggests that speech is produced in measure bursts of ‘initiator power’, otherwise known as feet. These are the basic rhythmic units of a language. Every langauge has its own isochronism, which is a rhythm based on roughly equal units, made up of quantae. In English each initiator burst corresponds to a stressed syllable and syllabic intervals are usually equal, therefore English is said to be stress-timed. French, on the other hand, is more simply one burst per syllable and is therefore syllable-timed. Consequentailly it is easy to define syllabic paramters in a syllable timed language, but not the otherwise. This approach, although it helps to identify peaks of syllables, does not find their boundaries. Nonetheless, it seems likely that the universal phonetic definition of a syllable will have a rhythmic basis, as all languages have inherent rhythmic organisaiton.
All things considered, syllables can be best defined in terms of the speaker’s actions. It may be something physical, like a combination of respiratory activity and movement of the larynx. It could also be said that syllables are abstract units of speech, intrinsically necessary for organisation and speech production. Evidence to support this are slips of the tongue; when someone slips up and says ‘wold cater’ instead of ‘cold water’, it is almost always the initial or final consonant (the onset or coda) of a syllable which is being replaced. This is inexplicable unless a syllable actually has some sort of sugnificance as a unit in speech production.
In summary, there are two principal types of theories which attempt to define syllables. Some do so in terms of sound property like sonority, and others do so considering the activity of the speaker, and assert that the syllable is an organisatory unit of speech.