Pulses in speech

The syllable is like the heart beat of a pulse. The syllable has timing, scaling, and sonority. There are syllables in every spoken language. The syllable is never smaller than the phoneme or larger than the word. The syllable is an element of the articulatory / perceptual system. And the word is an element of the conceptual / semantic system. Both systems are necessary and universal. But despite the universality, the fact that there are two separate systems here is plainly a learnability issue for some (rare) children. Such a child may say bottle as BOP, completely missing the second syllable and assimilating the tongue tip T to the lip action B. 

The following restrictions are common across languages:

• All syllables begin with an ‘onset’, or at least one consonant before the ‘nucleus’, typically a vowel, and so words like arm are disallowed (and thus unpronounceable) because of not having an onset;
• No ‘coda’ or a consonant after the vowel is allowed, so words like arm are similarly disallowed because of the final M, or only one sort of consonant is allowed, like the M in arm, but not the K in ark.
• Both of these restrictions apply, with the effect that all syllables consist of just one consonant followed by one vowel, as in toe, saw, cow.
• No vowel can have more than one element, where an element may consist in a unit of length or another variation of features, disallowing a contrast between short and long vowels including diphthongs;
• No word can consist of a syllable with less than two elements its ‘rime’ or its nucleus and coda if any – where this restriction is breached in English only in the two commonest words, a and the. English requires at least two elements in the ‘rime’ of a lexical monosyllable.

It seems that all languages allow syllables with a consonant and a vowel. Languages vary in how far they depart from this minimal CV template. And this has to be learnt up to the age of around seven. On a scale of markedness, CV syllables are the least marked. CV represents the simplest and most acoustically salient sort of syllabic pulsing. The vowel or nucleus represents an acoustic peak, dying away rapidly, preceded by a less sonorous onset. Some languages don’t allow any syllables more complex than a CV syllable. In a way that is quite uncommon across languages, English is permissive in both directions, allowing onsets and codas with three phonemes in each, STR in straw SPL in splash, SKW in square in the onset, and MPS in glimpse and KST in next in the coda, and all of these complexities in the vowel and consonants in strange. The permissions here are defined by by what is known as the ‘phonotactics‘. The restrictions are reflected in the normal process of speech acquisition. The extreme permissiveness of English is highly problematic for some children in ways that affect not just their speech, but also their reading and writing. Some children have difficulty going beyond a simple CV structure as in bee, or even going beuond a simple rime as in arm.

By an even stronger version of the acoustic approach here, there is no such thing as the syllable as such, just a unit of timing, known as the ‘mora’ from Japanese. But this, in my view, makes it difficult to describe the extreme of complexity allowed by English in the internal structure of the syllable. Nunes (2002) lists seven approaches to a definition. These approaches vary in how far they allow linguistic factors as primitives in the definition. I personally think that there can’t be any variation in the terms of the definition. Or the syllable could not have evolved.

By a consensus among linguists over the past 100 years, there is an asymmetry wihin the syllable with the nucleus and the coda (if any) as one constitituent, and the onset as another. So there is aliteration between onsets in “Round the rugged rocks the ragged rascal ran” and rhymes between the rimes of two stressed syllables and any following syllables as beween Melanie and felony.

There is evidence for this asymmetry between onsets and rimes in the fact that failure to pronounce codas is much commoner in child speech than failure to pronounce onsets. So, for example, bus might be pronounced as BU without the S.

Unusually, English allows L, R, N and M as the nuclei of unstressed syllables, in little, middle, wiggle, bottle, metre, button, and prism. Such syllables without a ‘built-in’ vowel are quite unusual across the world’s languages. In most languages, all syllables have a built-in vowel. The fact that this is not so for English, that there are what is known as ‘syllabic consonants’, is plainly something which children learning English have to learn. And for most children learning English, this point seems to be quite hard to learn. The L as a syllabic nucleus, is pronounced as something like OO. Children tend to say little as LICKOO and middle as MIGGOO. And this often continues for two years or more. Somehow the L sound at the end disrupts a preceding T or D. Various analyses have been proposed, most famously by Neil Smith (1972). Revealingly, children do not pronounce tickle as TITTOO or toggle as TODDOO, with the opposite relations between T and K and between D and G. The presence of the L forces an increase in the  contrast between it and the preceding T or D,

Allowing both codas and empty onsets, with up to three consonants in each, and a large inventory of vowels. English allows over 5,000 possible syllables.

The special case of spaghetti

Many children pronounce spaghetti as BASKETI with the S seemingly migrating into the onset of the stressed syllable. But a few children go one step further and lose the vowel in the first syllable, saying this as PSKETI. The onset PSK is not in any way natural. But on one possible analysis, the P is syllabified on the left edge as a nucleus. This would then be a case of learners exploiting an option, not available in English, but available from the stock of options evidenced by language generally, allowing phonemes like P to constitute the nuclei of syllables. English allows L as a syllabic nucleus in a way that many languages don’t. PSKETI speakers go a step further,