Li6 Phonology and MorphologyLi6 Phonology and Morphology

Syllables and syllabification

Today’s topicsToday’s topics

Evidence for the syllable and its components

How syllable structure is assigned to phonological representations

Syllable structureSyllable structure

Maybe also Appendix (though this probably attaches to the Prosodic Word)

σ

Rhyme

Onset Nucleus Coda

SyllablesSyllables

Most people have clear intuitions about syllable counts and divisions. sing.er : see.ker at.lan.tic : a.tro.cious

Are they simply counting vowels? No: button Abkhaz mts’k’ ‘type of fly’ (Vaux 1997) Syllable divisions cannot refer simply to vowels

pa.per vs sing.er, distend vs distaste Vulg. Lat. /ad.ri.pa.re/ ar.ri.va.re ‘arrive’ vs.

ca.the.dra ‘chair’ (Steriade 1988)

Evidence for syllables as Evidence for syllables as phonological unitsphonological units

Morphological rules Language games Psycholinguistic phenomena Restrictions on coarticulation Phonological rules Poetics Writing systems

Morphological rulesMorphological rules

Armenian plural selection (Vaux 2003) šun-er ‘dogs’ : katu-ner ‘cats’

Language gamesLanguage games French ‘Verlan’

l’envers vérité térivé, etc. (cf. Plénat 1995)

Fula deftere teredef, etc. (Bagemihl 1989)

Korean original

san†ok’i †ok’iya ³til¥l kan¥nya? k’a²…o² k’a²…o² t’wimy³ns³ ³til¥l kan¥nya? wild rabbit, wild rabbit, where are you going? running hoppity-hop, where are you going?

type 1 k’i†osan yak’i†o l¥lti³ nyan¥ka? …o²k’a² …o²k’a² s³my³nt’wi l¥lti³ nyan¥ka?

type 2 sapa†opok’ipi †opok’ipiyapa ³p³tipil¥p¥ kapan¥p¥nyapa? k’apa…opo k’apa…opo t’wipimy³p³s³p³ ³p³tipil¥p¥ kapan¥p¥nyapa?

Psycholinguistic phenomenaPsycholinguistic phenomena Response times

Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder & Segui 1981 “press the button once you hear [pa]” subjects detected [pa] faster in pa.lace subjects detected [pal] faster in pal.mier.

Tip of the tongue phenomena Brown and McNeill 1966

Speech errors Fromkin 1971

Onset metathesis dreater swying

Rhyme metathesis A hunk of jeep

Stemberger: more than 90% of ordering speech errors invert O-O, C-C omission of entire syllable

unanímity unámity, treméndously trémenly, specifícity specífity

Restrictions on coarticulationRestrictions on coarticulation

Phonetic coarticulation effects generally restricted to tautosyllabic contexts e.g. In French, onset but not coda

consonants coarticulate with a tautosyllabic vowel, whether or not other consonants intervene

e.g. in oucri [u.ki], k shows significant effects from the i, despite the intervening liquid (Rialland 1994:144).

English r-coloring

Phonological rulesPhonological rules

English aspiration [ph]it : s[p]it dis[t]end : dis[th]aste

Nickname formation Andy, *Andry (Kenstowicz 1994)

PoeticsPoetics

Many languages employ syllable-counting meters, e.g. Sanskrit anuʂʈubh (4 x 8 σ) Rigveda 10.90.12 (Sacrifice of the primeval

giant Purusha) brāhmaņo [a]sya mukham āsīd,

His mouth was the priest, bāhū rāĵaniah krtah

His two arms were made the warrior, ūrū tad asya yad vayšyah

His two thighs were the farmer, padbhyām šūdro aĵāyata.

From his two feet the dog-eater was born.

Writing systemsWriting systems

Some Linear B renditions of Mycenean Greek: U qe [kwe] ‘and’ YcMt qa-si-re-u [gwasileus] ‘king’ yZn ~ yZ wa-na(-ka) [wanaks] ‘king’ q.> a-ko-ro [agros] ‘field’ vs q/> a-ku-ro [arguros] ‘silver’

Evidence for syllabic constituentsEvidence for syllabic constituents Onset vs Rhyme

English L-allomorphy Blends (see next slides)

Rhyme common domain of poetic rhyme Syllable weight

Onset Buenos Aires Spanish y ž: ley ‘law’ vs. ležes ‘laws’ Pig Latin?

Nucleus Japanese -rV- language game?

Coda English glottalization/unrelease (e.g. hat, Atlantic vs. atrocious) German devoicing (Freun[t] ‘friend (m)’ vs. Freun[d]in ‘friend

(f)’, glau[p]lich) assuming that disjoint environments aren’t allowed, we need

the Coda

BlendsBlends Experiment 1

Question Do Onsets and Rimes exist (as suggested by e.g. brunch

vs. *blunch)? Method

Train subjects to combine pairs of well-formed English nonce monosyllables (such as krint and glupth) into a new monosyllable that contains parts of both.

Results responses like krupth (Onset kr- of the first syllable and

Rime -upth of the second) were produced far more often than any other possible combination.

Conclusion The natural break within English syllables is immediately

before the vowel (i.e. Onset vs. Rime).

σ σ

O R O R

N C N C

k r i n t g l u p th

Experiments from Treiman 1983

BlendsBlends Experiment 2

Hypothesis If a syllable is composed of Onset + Rime, then artificial

games that keep these units intact should be easier to learn than games that break up the syllables in a different way.

Method Subjects taught 2 types of word games:

1.Blend the Onset of a nonce CCVCC syllable with the Rime of another

e.g. fl-irz + gr-uns fl-uns2.Combine non-constituents (f-runs, flins, flir-s).

Results Game 1 was learned with fewer errors than was Games

2. Conclusion

Speakers have access to the constituents O and R.Experiments from Treiman 1983

SyllabificationSyllabification

Q: Are syllables part of the lexical entries of words?

A: Since syllable structure appears to be predictable, we want to say that it is assigned by rule.

Q: What rules do we need to assign syllabic structures? Kahn 1976 et seq.:

attach nuclei attach onsets attach codas cope with whatever’s left over

ordering onset attachment before coda attachment derives onset maximisation

The basic procedureThe basic procedure

Harari (K and K 1977)Harari (K and K 1977)

UR SR glosst-sʌbr tisʌbri ‘break’, 2masc imf.t-sʌbr-i tisʌbri 2fy-sʌbr yisʌbri 3mt-sʌbr tisʌbri 3fn-sʌbr nisʌbri 1plt-sʌbr-u tisʌbru 2ply-sʌbr-u yisʌbru 3plzʌ-t-sbʌr zʌtsibʌr 2m neg imfzʌ-t-sbʌr-i zʌtsibʌri 2f neg imfzʌ-y-sbʌr zʌysibʌr 3m neg imfzʌ-t-sbʌr zʌtsibʌr 3f neg imfzʌ-n-sbʌr zʌnsibʌr 1pl neg imfzʌ-t-sbʌr-u zʌtsibʌru 2pl neg imfzʌ-y-sbʌr-u zʌysibʌru 3pl neg imf <härär bira>

Vowel hiatusVowel hiatus

Generally interpreted as subcase of requirement that all syllables must have an onset Glottal stop insertion: [] ‘art’, etc.

Article allomorphy Glide insertion and r-insertion?

ConclusionsConclusions

There is extensive evidence for the abstract prosodic elements σ, O, N, C, R.

Syllable structure is normally predictable, and can be derived by a relatively simple set of rules. The ordering of these rules can generate

effects such as Onset Maximisation and location of epenthetic vowels.

ReferencesReferences

Bagemihl, Bruce. 1989. The crossing constraint and ‘backwards languages’. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 7.4:481-549.

Brown, Roger & David McNeill. 1966. The “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 5:325-337.

Fromkin, Victoria. 1971. The non-anomalous nature of anomalous utterances. Language 47:27-52.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_of_the_tonguehttp://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/speech-errors.htmlKahn, Daniel. 1976. Syllable-based generalizations in English phonology. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.

[Published 1980 New York: Garland Press.]Kenstowicz, Michael and Charles Kisseberth. 1977. Generative phonology. New York: Academic Press.Mehler, J., J. Dommergues, Uli Frauenfelder, and J. Segui. 1981. The syllable’s role in speech

segmentation. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 20:298-305. Plénat, Marc. 1995. Une approche prosodique de la morphologie du verlan. Lingua 95:97-129.Rialland, Annie. 1994. The phonology and phonetics of extrasyllabicity in French. In Patricia A. Keating,

ed., Phonological Structure and Phonetic Form. Papers in Laboratory Phonology 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 136-159.

Stemberger, Joseph. 1983. Speech errors and theoretical phonology: a review. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club.

Steriade, Donca 1988. Gemination and the Proto-Romance Syllable Schift. Advances in Romance Linguistics, edited by David Birdsong & Jean-Pierre Montreuil, 371-409. Dordrecht: Foris.

Treiman, Rebecca. 1983. The structure of spoken syllables: Evidence from novel word games. Cognition 15:49-74.

Vaux, Bert. 1997. The Cwyzhy Dialect of Abkhaz. Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics 6, Susumu Kuno, Bert Vaux, and Steve Peter, eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Linguistics Department.

Vaux, Bert. 2003. Syllabification in Armenian, Universal Grammar, and the lexicon. Linguistic Inquiry 34.1:91-125.

Intervocalic C sequencesIntervocalic C sequences

A priori, it’s not obvious how to syllabify intervocalic Cs Oft-invoked principle: Onset Maximisation Problems:

stress vowel quality morpheme boundaries phonotactics ambisyllabicity

merry, happy…