Syllabicity

Phonology Notes 4/12 Features (UR) ? segments (tone) ? morae ? syllables ? words (and morphemes) ? post lexical (intonation) Stuff that goes into the relationship between morae and syllables Syllables are usually represented by sigma. Syllables have onset and rhyme, and in turn rhyme is made up of nucleus and coda. Onset and coda are always consonants, and the nucleus is always a vowel. For example, the word diskriminejt ? Cvcccvcvcvvc. ? this is what might be called the skeletal tier. So every vowel is the nucleus, so every time we have a nucleus, it is a syllable. So now we decide where the onset is by using the maximum onset principle ? this says that consonants want to be in the onset as much as possible. Rhymes come in two types ? you can have a light rhyme (syllable) or heavy rhyme (syllable). Sometimes we say syllable, but it does not have anything to do with the onset. A light rhyme is a short vowel. A heavy syllable is any kind of complex nucleus or combination of nucleus and coda (long vowels, v + c, diphthongs). So we refer to these things as units of weight (mora). So morae can be added over all of the vowels in a skeletal tier. Long vowels and diphthongs have two vowels, and short vowels have one. The difference between heavy and light syllables is all in the rhyme. Compensatory lengthening ? There are many examples of CVCC ? where the 2nd consonant gets deleted, but the vowel gets lengthened in the process. What happens in this situation is that you get a complex consonant in the onset, and to compensate the vowel becomes long (because of the fact that there is still a timing slot for the 2nd consonant that disappeared). History of English example ? There are quite a few words in English where the german cognate has a nasal and the fricative. Five ? funf Mouth ? mund Tooth ? zahn Goose ? ganz So the old form in English of five was finf ? but the n was deleted, and because of the fact that it?s timing slot still existed, the vowel became long. Template morphology ? what you do is assign a template to a word with the vowel pattern as part of the morpheme. So a regular verb in Arabic has CVCVC as a template, but a causative has a geminate consonant in the middle (CVCCVC), and another form that they call the influencing form has a long vowel in the first rhyme instead of a short vowel instead of the short one. So if you want to construct a passive causative, you just use the template to exchange the active vowels a a with the passive u I vowels. OCP ?