This chapter provides an overview of Slavic syllable structure from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It begins by introducing some general phonological background on the syllable and reviewing key concepts, such as syllabification and sonority. The discussion further focuses on specific aspects of Slavic syllable structure: inventories of syllable-initial and syllable-final consonants and consonant clusters, and the composition of syllable peaks (vowels and syllabic consonants). This is done by situating patterns characteristic of Slavic in the context of cross-linguistic typology of syllable structure, as well as by highlighting common historical sources and more recently developed differences among individual Slavic languages. The chapter concludes with a short review of recent experimental and corpus work on Slavic syllable structure.

This chapter covers the general features of the Homeric hexameter and the most famous debates therein, before asking the more general question as to what was the usefulness of meter for oral-traditional poets. Section 1 introduces the metrical scheme of the hexameter (including incisions and bridges), the principles of scansion and syllabification. Section 2 explores the colometry of the hexameter, and introduces the prosodic hierarchy. It also employs intonational data to argue tha the Homeric hexameter coincided with an intonational phrase, and its cola mostly with phonological phrases, and provides a new prosodic account of enjambement in Homer. Section 3 covers previous attempt at establishing the historical origin of the hexameter, arguing that the account of Kiparsky 2018 is the most promising. Section 4 looks at the speech of professional sportscasters, and argues that it shows several types of prosodic regularization that is akin to a basic type of meter. Extensive prosodic regularization diminishes the options available to a speaker, making it easier to sustain high levels of fluency. Meter arguably fulfilled a similar task in oral-traditional composition in performance.

In this chapter, we move from discussing English segmentals – individual consonant and vowel sounds – to suprasegmentals, the units of sound above the level of the segment. This includes stress, pitch, and tone, and extends above individual vowel and consonants to syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. At the core of our discussion of suprasegmentals is the syllable, which can be defined as a unit of organization for sound sequences. Every word is made up of minimally one syllable; in some languages, including English, words often contain multiple syllables.

We begin the chapter by examining what we mean by 'syllable', and the components of a syllable, including the onset, nucleus, and coda. We then examine syllable inventories cross-linguistically, with a special focus on the languages that influence varieties of English. An overview of English syllable structure is then provided, with a focus on how syllable structure varies across varieties. In the final section of the chapter, you will be guided through exercises designed to check your understanding of the content of the chapter and to analyse your own English syllable inventory.

This chapter introduces the Chinese sound system, with a focus on syllable structure. An overview of the nature and distribution of Chinese initial consonants, finals, and tones is introduced, and the rules of tone sandhi are also explained.

In this chapter, the syllable structure of Romance languages is addressed, focusing on properties shared by all varieties as well as some specific aspects of individual varieties. The syllable template adopted is hierachical and binary, with crucial recognition of the rhyme as an intermediate constituent. The fate of vowel quantity is discussed within a framework that takes the concepts of variation and multilingualism are primary, whilst making reference to current historical sociolinguistics. In addition to the main phonological processes sensitive to syllable structure, the prosodic categories of stress and timing are also briefly illustrated. The notion of proto-Romance is criticized as not corresponding to any historically documented linguistic reality nor to a uniform system, but only to an artificially reconstructed schema. In a classification of the Romance languages, taking into account the more dynamic force of the northern Romance varieties, it is argued that a vertical axis (i.e., North–South) is better than the traditional horizontal East–West axis.

The use of prosodic categories gives a clearer understanding of the intonation of utterancesthan the syntactic structure that was assumed in SPE. The prosodic hierarchy includes eight categories from the highest (the phonological utterance)through the intermediate cateories (intonation phrase, phonological phrase, clitic group, phonological word, foot, syllable) to the lowest (the mora). Each unit consists exclusively of units of the next lower category, though certain derived structures are possible with nesting, as when a syllable is adjoined to a foot. In that case the original foot is a constituent of the derived larger foot and a sister to the adjoined syllable. Exemplification of segmental rules that apply in terms of each prosodic category from English and other languages. The three highest units can sometimes be restructured, either broken into smaller units or combined into a larger unit. Summary of the postlexical rules.

The syllable and the mora as units of utterances, SPE's treatment without an explicit syllable, approaches to syllables including the syllable boundary approach, the autosegmental approach, the constituent-structure approach, and the moraic approach. Conditions on onsets and codas in various languages. Rules for syllabification in English, and some exceptional patterns.

In this chapter we consider the interaction of morphology and phonology. We begin with a look at allomorphy, distinguishing predictible allomorphy, partially predictable allomorphy, and idiosyncratic or unpredictable allomorphy. Students learn to look for phonological rules that create predictable allomorphy. Students are introduced to the ways in which the syllable structure of a language can interact with its morphology. Students are also introduced to the idea of lexical strata, looking at differences in behavior between various English derivational affixes. This chapter also includes a ‘how to’ section on analyzing morphologically induced phonological rules.

Chapter 3 first summarizes the differences between phonetics (Chapter 2), which looks at human speech sounds in general, and phonology, which examines how a subset of possible sounds is used and distributed in specific languages. It introduces the concept of the phonological unit, the phoneme, and how phonemes can be identified by minimal pairs, that is, comparing words that differ by only one sound yet have distinct meanings. It also explains the difference between phonemes and allophones that are typically the result of sound processes, as seen in Chapter 2, but may also be in free variation. We then explain how phonemes can be reduced to a limited set of distinctive features that allow us to organize them into natural classes to which phonological rules may be applied. We see how these rules can be represented easily to capture important generalizations about phonology. The chapter also examines the structure of syllables and explains how different languages may syllabify words and phrases in different ways, while at the same time obeying universal principles. The chapter ends with a section on how to discover the sound system of a language.