Above the

segment:
Syllables

Maria
Maria Crista
Crista Jane
Jane I.I. Ventusa
Ventusa
Defining the Syllable
The syllable is made up of a syllabic nucleus, which is
usually a vowel, and its associated non-syllabic
segments.
• Native speakers of a language demonstrate their
awareness of this unit of phonological structure
whenever they count syllables in a word.
• One of the many interesting things about this awareness
is the way in which it interacts with phonotactics.
• Speakers do not syllabify
words in a way that violates
the phonotactic constraints
of their language.
The word extreme
would never be
syllabified as
SETTING UP SYLLABLES
1. STEP A. Each syllabic
segment(usually a vowel) makes up a
syllabic nucleus.
STEP B.

The longest sequence of consonants

to the left of each nucleus that
does not violate the phonotactic
constraints of the language in
question is called the onset of the
STEP C.
Any remaining consonants to the
right of each nucleus are called coda
and are linked to a C above them.
This C is associated with the syllabic
nucleus to its left.
STEP D.

Syllables that make up a

single form (usually a word)
branch out from the symbol
. .
Applying the same procedure to syllabify
English words will yield different results
because of the language-specific differences
in phonotactic constraints. The following
figure demonstrates the syllabification of the
English words slim, decline and scratch.
With this method in mind, we can
now consider the relevance of
syllables of phonological
description.
Table 3.25 shows, the voiceless stops of
English each have an aspirated and an
aspirated allophone.
Person
Beautiful
Information
Breakfast
Banana
Tomorrow
university
CONNECTION OF STRESSED AND
SYLLABLE

• If the word has only one syllable you

don’t need to think about stress.
• But if the word has 2 syllables or more,
one syllable is always stress, it has a
strong clear pronunciation.
Thank you for
listening....
ENGLISH LONG AND SHORT
VOWELS
• English offers a second example of the phonological
relevance of syllables.
The use of syllabic representations in phonology often
allows us to make more general statements about
allophonic patterns in language than if we use only
statements that do not make reference to syllable
structure.