0(b) -the Role of the Syllable in the Organization and Realization of Sound Systems

1 Preliminaries Theories of phonology include an inventory of basic elements, such as segments, tones, stress, features, and gestures, and a model that accounts for their distribution and realization. The phonological context is taken to be organized into higher-order prosodic constituents, which structure and constrain the realization of phonological elements. Moving from elements to their distribution, this section addresses issues pertaining to the syllable as an organizing constituent of phonological units, bridging between the coordination of articulatory events (**Gafos & Goldstein, this chapter**) and prosodic structure (**Turk, this chapter, and chapter 11**). A large range of approaches to the syllable have been offered, varying in their level of abstractness and supported by an impressive variety of experimental results. Despite the richness and sophistication of this body of research and the intuitive attractiveness of the syllable, the syllabic domain remains difficult to define and characterize, physically and formally. Questions surrounding the syllable concern its nature (1-4), its role in the organization and production of sound systems (5-6), and its crosslinguistic variability (7). (1) Is the syllable an abstract primitive, governed by universal organizational principles such as those requiring syllable onsets or prohibiting syllable codas, or an epiphenomenal category emerging from linguistic experience (e.g. Ohala 1992, 2008; Bertinetto 2001)? Does it have a substantive status in the analysis of sound systems, or is it merely a descriptive concept, a surface and loosely defined segmental grouping? 2 (2) What is the internal structure of the syllable? One can distinguish between a rhythmic organization involving the mora as a unit of segment quantity and syllable weight, and a segmental organization relying on subsyllabic constituents (see Zec 2007 for a recent discussion). These include the nucleus, the onset (the preceding consonants), the coda (the following consonants), the rime (nucleus+coda), and the body (onset+nucleus). (3) What is the basis (phonetic or other) of syllable structure and syllabification procedures? (4) How does the syllable relate to the segmental content and to other prosodic constituents? (5) What categories of processes and generalizations, if any, are characterized in terms of syllable structure? Are they sensitive to the position of syllable edges and/or the syllabic affiliation of segments? (6) At what levels, if any, does the syllable intervene in mechanisms of speech perception and production? (7) What aspects of the syllable are universal or subject to crosslinguistic variation? Several reviews of the syllable from a formal phonological perspective are available, …