Does Gokana Really Have No Syllables? (Or: What’s So Great About Being Universal?)

Over 25 years ago, Hyman (1983, 1985) made the claim that Gokana, an Ogoni (Niger-Congo) language of Nigeria, does not organise its consonants and vowels into syllables. This was a radical and in principle non-welcome position, given the centrality of the syllable in almost all phonological work at the time. Still, as Richard Hayward pointed out many years later, the extensive treatment of Gokana largely went unnoticed: Hyman's account of the Nigerian language Gokana and in particular his well-argued claim that Gokana represents a case where invocation of the syllable buys nothing insightful for explaining the phonology of the language should have disturbed profoundly the settled orthodoxy surrounding the universality of the syllable. That a vowel (the quintessential syllable nucleus) is not guaranteed syllable membership is a very strong proposal, but one has little sense that it has attracted overmuch comment.... In my view it would be unfortunate if Gokana were to be regarded simply as an interesting oddity, rather than as the limiting case in a clinal situation in which many languages may participate to some degree in the course of their phonologies. (Hayward 1997:78) While there was almost no response to the claim of no syllables in Gokana, the proposal of Hyman (1983, 1985) to establish moras as a central building block in phonology did gain currency, and was particularly welcome by specialists of Japanese, long viewed as exclusively moraic in its prosodic structure. Since that time work on the syllable has gone in opposite directions: While Kubozono (1999, 2003) has presented evidence that the syllable may in fact play a role in Japanese, Steriade (1999) and Blevins (2003) have argued that the syllable is less needed elsewhere, e.g. to account for phonotactic constraints and perhaps certain rhythmic effects (Steriade 2009). It seems that the status of the syllable is thus once again up for grabs, as has been the case in its rocky "on-again, off-again" past. In this paper I take a new look at the Gokana facts and the original claim to ask the question in my title, motivated in part by overlooked (possibly ambiguous) evidence for the syllable in Gokana. The paper will end by situating the issue within the context of recent discussions of universals vs. diversity (Evans & Levinson 2009), with my claim that English and Gokana are at the opposite ends of the “clinal situation” which Hayward suspected in the above quote. * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of California, Berkeley, the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (Lyon), and at the Queen Mary University of London Workshop on Tones and Prosodic Constituents (March 25-6, 2010). UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2010)