Unit 8 syllabic structure of english words
Main Theories on Syllabic Structure.
Syllable Formation and Syllable Division.
Functions of Syllables.
It’s generally known that speech is a continuum. However, it can be broken into minimal pronounceable units into which sounds show a tendency to cluster or group themselves. These smallest phonetic groups are called syllables.
Being the smallest pronounceable units the syllables form language units of greater magnitude i.e. morphemes, words, phrases. Each of these units is characterized by a certain syllabic structure.
A meaningful language unit has two aspects syllable formation and syllable division, which form a dialectical unity.
The syllable is fairly complicated phenomenon and like the phoneme it may be studied on the four levels: acoustic, articulatory, auditory and functional.
1. Talking about the analysis of articulatory aspect of the syllable we could start with the so–called expiratory or chest pulse or pressure theory (Stetson).
This theory is based on the assumption that expiration in speech is a pulsating process and each syllable should correspond to a single expiration so that their number is determined by the number of expirations made in the production of the utterance.
This theory was criticized by the Soviet and some foreign linguists.
2. Another theory is the theory of syllable formation put forward by Otto Jesperson. It’s called the sonority theory and is based on the concept of sonority i.e. each sound is characterized by a certain degree of sonority which is understood as acoustic property of a sound that determines its perceptibility.
According to this sound property, a ranking of speech sounds could be established. It starts with the open vowels through the close vowels, the sonorants, the voiced fricatives, the voiced plosives, the voiceless fricatives, the voiceless plosives and ends with the least sonorous – the marginal segments.
In
the word “plant” the sequence passes from the minimally sonorous
[p] through [l] with a greater degree of sonority to the maximum
sonorous [a:]. It continues with decreasing sonority through [n] to a
second minimum sonorous [t]:
[pla:nt]
According to Vassilyev, the most serious drawback of this theory is that it fails to explain the actual mechanism of syllable formation and division. Besides, the concept of sonority with which this theory operates isn’t very clearly defined.
3. In Soviet linguistics there has been adopted the theory of muscular tension shared by Shcherba. The energy, that is the tension of articulation, increases within the range of prevocalic consonant and then decreases within the range of postvocalic consonants. Therefore, the syllable can be defined as an arc of articulatory (muscular) tension. The phonemes preceding or following the syllable peak are called marginal.
This theory has been modified by Vassilyev. The point is that the syllable like any other pronounceable unit can be characterized by three physical parameters:
Pitch
Intensity
Length.
Within the range of the syllable these parameters vary from minimum on the prevocalic consonant to maximum on the center of the syllable, and then there is another decrease within the postvocalic consonants.
So, if we take into consideration the tension of articulation and the above mentioned acoustic data on the speech production level the syllable can be treated as an arc of articulatory effort.
4. The Soviet linguist Zhinkin has suggested the so-called loudness theory, which defines the syllable on both levels: of production and of perception.
#2.All these theories appear because of the differences, which arise from the various possibilities of the approach to the unit. There are 2 viewpoints on it:
1. The syllable is a purely articulatory unit, which lacks any functional value. This point of view is defended on the grounds that the boundaries of the syllable don't always coincide with those of the morphemes.
2. The syllable is the smallest pronounceable unit, which can reveal some linguistic function.
The definition of the syllable from the functional point of view tends to single out the following features of it:
- a) a syllable is a chain of phonemes of various lengths.
- b) a syllable is constructed on the basis of contrast of its constituency, which is usually of vowel + consonant type.
-c) the nucleus of a syllable is a vowel. The presence of consonants is optional.
d) the distribution of phonemes in the syllabic structure follows the rules, which are specific for a particular language.
Syllable formation in English is based on the phonological opposition vowel + consonant. Vowels are usually syllabic, while consonants are not, with the exception of l, m, n, which become syllabic if they occur in an unstressed final position preceded by a noise consonant:
Example: ′li-tl ′ke-tl
′ ga:-dn ′ se-tl
blo-sm s -dn
The structure of the syllable is known to vary, because of the number and the arrangement of the consonants. There are distinguished four types of syllables in English:
Open no [n u] consonant + vowel
Closed odd [ d] vowel + consonant
Covered note [n ut] consonant + vowel + consonant
Uncovered oh [ u] vowel + consonant
It should be noted that due to its structure the English language has developed the closed type of syllable as a fundamental one, while in Russian it's the open type that forms the basis of syllable formation.
Example: мама, папа, письмо, панама, перо.
The number of syllable varieties from the point of view of their structure is 23. The structure of the English syllable reveals variations in the number of prevocalic consonants from 1 to 3 and postvocalic consonants from 1 to 5.
The number of syllables in the English word can vary from 1 to 8.
Example: big (1), city (2), family (3), simplicity (4), unexpectedly (5), enthusiastically (7).
The other aspect of the dialectical unity, which characterizes the speech continuum, is syllable division. It's the syllabic division that determines the syllabic structure of the language, its syllabic typology.
It's easy to understand that syllabic structure of the language like its phonemic structure is patterned, which means that the sounds of a language can be grouped into syllables according to certain rules. The part of phonetics that deals with this aspect of a language is called phonotactics.
In the English language the problem of syllable division exists only in case of intervocalic consonants and their clusters like in the words: city, agree, extra.
In such cases, the point of syllable division is not easily found. Let's consider the first case: city.
Theoretically, two variants are possible: