Suprasegmental structure

Another aspect of nonlinear representational theory is the claim that there are phonologically significant structures above the level of the segment, i.e. units that encompass multiple segments. Such structures are referred to as “prosodic,” a term which refers to poetic meter, rhythm, and singing, which are aspects of language use that involve “how strings of segments are performed.” The best-known unit of prosody is the traditional concept of the syllable. The term itself is one of the oldest in linguistics, originating from Ancient Greek sullabe, but the nature of the syllable and arguments for it have been elusive. At various points in contemporary linguistics, scholars have rejected or embraced the syllable, and the syllable was not part of standard generative phonological theory, until 1976 when Kahn produced strong arguments for it within autosegmental theory.

The intuitive concept of “syllable” is not particularly difficult to understand: it is a string of segments which centers around one or more vowels, and includes some consonants to the left and to the right. The problem resides in justifying the addition of this concept to our arsenal of analytical devices. In segmental representations, there are audible consequences of features; for example you can hear voicing, nasality, and glottalization on segments, even though relating features to phonetic properties is difficult. The problem of the syllable is that it has no audible defining property, thus it cannot be justified as a prima facie transcriptional fact: no amount of ear training will enable you to “hear” how many syllables there are in a word of the form [CVVVVC] in some unfamiliar language, and in [VCCCCV] you cannot “hear” where one syllable begins and the other ends. The evidence for the syllable is indirect, in that grouping sequences of segments into a unit can lead to a simpler account of certain phonological processes, in numerous languages.