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Date: 2023-07-20
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syllable (n.) (syll)
A UNIT of pronunciation typically larger than a single sound and smaller than a WORD. A word may be pronounced ‘syllable at a time’, as in ne-ver-the-less, and a good dictionary will indicate where these syllabic divisions occur in writing, thus providing information about how a word may be hyphenated. The notion of syllable, in short, is very real to NATIVE-SPEAKERS, and is often used in a quasi-technical sense in everyday conversation (e.g. Shall I put it in words of one syllable?). Syllabification is the term which refers to the division of a word into syllables; resyllabification refers to a REANALYSIS which alters the location of syllable boundaries. A word containing a single syllable is called a monosyllable; if it contains more than one, the term polysyllable is used (or monosyllabic word/polysyllabic word respectively).
Providing a precise definition of the syllable is not an easy task, and there are several theories in both PHONETICS and PHONOLOGY which have tried to clarify matters. From a phonetic viewpoint, attempts have been made to define the syllables of a LANGUAGE on the basis of the articulatory effort needed in order to produce them. The ‘pulse’ or ‘motor’ theory of syllable production proposed by the psychologist R. H. Stetson (1892–1950) argued that each syllable corresponds to an increase in air pressure, air from the lungs being released as a series of chest pulses. This can often be readily felt and measured, particularly in emphatic speech; but it is also often difficult to detect such a pulse in adjacent syllables, as when two VOWELS co-occur, e.g. going (which is two syllables, but usually said in a single muscular effort). An alternative phonetic approach attempts to define the syllable in auditory terms: the PROMINENCE theory argues that, in a STRING of sounds, some are intrinsically more ‘sonorous’ than others, and that each ‘peak’ of SONORITY corresponds to the centre of a syllable. These peaks are best illustrated by vowels, which have the greater carrying-power. The less sonorous sounds provide ‘valleys’ of prominence, and are best illustrated by the closures and narrowings which produce consonants. This approach gives a useful general guideline, but it does not always indicate clearly where the boundary between adjacent syllables falls, e.g. in busker, the problem of whether to split the word as bus-ker, bu-sker or busk-er is not answerable using arguments based on perceived sonority. The problem remains, even if other acoustic features than sonority (such as pitch or length) are incorporated within the notion of prominence, but has been specifically addressed in some phonological theories (notably METRICAL PHONOLOGY).
Phonetic approaches of this kind attempt to provide a definition of the syllable valid for all languages, and it is possible that more valid definitions in terms of speech production or perception will emerge. Phonological views of the syllable, on the other hand, focus on the ways sounds combine in individual languages to produce typical SEQUENCES. Here, two classes of sounds are usually established: sounds which can occur on their own, or at the centre of a sequence of sounds, and sounds which cannot occur on their own, or which occur at the edges of a sequence of sounds. The former include such sounds as [i], [a], [u], etc., and are generally referred to as VOWELS; the latter include such sounds as [p], [g], [f],