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НЕДЕЛЯ 8 LECTURE 5.THEME: SYLLABIC STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH WORDS
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| НЕДЕЛЯ 8
LECTURE 5.THEME: SYLLABIC STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH WORDS It is generally known that speech is a continuum. However, it can be broken into minimal pronounceable units into which sounds show a tendency to cluster or group themselves. These smallest phonetic groups are generally given the name of syllables. Being the smallest pronounceable units, the syllables form language units of greater magnitude, that is morphemes, words and phrases. Each of these units is characterized by a certain syllabic structure. Consequently we might say that a meaningful language unit has two aspects: syllable formation and syllable division which form a dialectical unity. Before we look at the English syllable in detail let us consider a fairly general problem of the syllable. Here we should note that the study of the syllable has for a long time occupied an important place in linguistics as a field of theoretical investigation. Besides, a considerable body of experimental work has been done. But though phonetics has progressed far enough the problem of the syllable is still an open question in phonetics. It is necessary to mention that the syllable is a fairly complicated phenomenon and like the phoneme it can be studied on four levels: acoustic, articulator^, auditory and functional, which means that the syllable can be approached from different points of view. The severe complexity of the phenomenon gave rise to many theories. Let us consider some of the most current ones. Talking about the analysis of articulatory or motor aspect of the syllable we could start with the so-called expiratory, or chest pulse or pressure theory which was experimentally based by R.H.Stetson. This theory is based on the assumption that expiration in speech is a pulsating process and each syllable should correspond to a single expiration so that the number of the syllables in an utterance is determined by the number of expirations made in the production of the utterance. This theory was strongly criticized by Soviet and foreign linguists. G.P.Torsuev, for example, writes that in a phrase a number of words and consequently syllables can be pronounced with a single expiration. This fact makes the validity of the pulse theory doubtful. Another theory most often referred to is the theory of syllable put forward by O.Jespersen. It is generally called the sonority theory and is based on the concept of sonority. According to O.Jespersen each sound is characterized by a certain degree of sonority which is understood as acoustic property of a sound that determines its perceptibility. According to this sound property a ranking of speech sounds could be established. This starts with the open vowels as the most sonorous, continues through the close vowels, the sonorants, the voiced fricatives, the voiced plosives, the voiceless fricatives and ends with the voiceless plosives as the least sonorous. In any sequence the most sonorous sounds tend to form the center of the syllable and the least sonorous – the marginal segments. Thus in the word plant, for example, the sequence passes from the minimally sonorous [p], through [1] with a greater degree of sonority to the maximum sonorous [a:]. It continues with decreasing sonority through [n] to a second minimum with [t]: It is true that this principle seems to be very general but there are, on the other hand, syllables in many languages which contradict it. In terms of sonority variation a sequence such as an English [stops] stops should have three syllables instead of its actual one. According to V.A. Vassilyev, the most serious drawback of this theory is that it fails to explain the actual mechanism of syllable formation and syllable division. Besides, the concept of sonority with which the theory operates is not very clearly defined, which makes it still less consistent. Further experimental work aimed at the description of the syllable as a phonetic phenomenon resulted in a lot of other theories, such as F. de Saussure's theory, the theory of the Rumanian linguist A.Rosetti, and the theory of the Czech linguist B.Hala. The existence of such a variety of approaches to the problem of the syllable means that it is not an easy matter to describe it. That is why the theories referred to above are unable to explain more than a restricted aspect of the phenomenon, for example, the sonority theory accounts only for perceptibility of sounds, the pulse theory takes into consideration only the force of expiration, etc. Summarizing we could state that the question of articulatory (or physiological) mechanism of syllable formation is still an open question in phonetics. We might suppose that this mechanism is similar in all languages and could be regarded as phonetic and physiological universal. In Soviet linguistics there has been adopted the theory of the syllable sketched in a very general way by L.V.Shcherba. It is called the theory of musculartension. The point is that in most languages there is a syllabic phoneme in the centre of the syllable which is usually a vowel phoneme or, in some languages, a sonorant. The phonemes preceding or .following the syllable peak are called marginal. The energy, that is the tension of articulation, increases within the range of prevocalic consonants and then decreases within the range of postvocalic consonants. Therefore the syllable can be defined as an arc of articulatory (or muscular) tension. It is worth noticing that the theory has been modified by V.A.Vassilyev. The point is that the syllable like any other pronounceable unit can be characterize?! by three physical parameters: pitch, intensity and length. Within the range of the syllable these parameters vary from minimum on the prevocalic consonants to maximum on the centre of the syllable, then there is another decrease within the postvocalic consonants. So the conclusion follows: if we take into consideration the tension of articulation and the above-mentioned acoustic data on the speech production level the syllable can be treated as an arc of articulatory effort, for example: Up till now we have spoken about theories which try to define the syllable on either of the two levels of production or perception. The Soviet linguist and psychologist N.I.Zhinkin has suggested the so-called loudness theory which seems to combine both levels. The experiments carried out by N.I.Zhinkin showed that the arc of loudness on perception level is formed due to variations of the volume of pharyngeal passage which is modified by contraction of its walls. The narrowing of the passage and the increase in muscular tension which results from it reinforce the actual loudness of a vowel thus forming the peak of the syllable. So according to this theory the syllable could be thought of as the arc of loudness which correlates with the arc of articulatory effort on the speech production level since variations in loudness are due to the work of all the speech mechanisms. It is perfectly obvious that the syllable is by no means a simple concept. No phonetician has succeeded so far in giving an exhaustive and adequate explanation of what the syllable is. The difficulties seem to arise from the various possibilities of approach to the unit. We could say there exist two points of view: 1. Some linguists consider the syllable to be a purely articulatory unit which lacks any functional value. This point of view is defended on the grounds that the boundaries of the syllable do not always coincide with those of the morphemes. 2. However the majority of linguists treat the syllable as the smallest pronounceable unit which can reveal some linguistic function. We should note here that while trying to detine the syllable from articulatory point of view we may talk about universals, that is categories applicable for all languages. When we mean the functional aspect of the syllable it should be defined with reference to the structure of one particular language rather than in general terms with universal application because, as A.C.Gimson points out, it may be found appropriate to divide a similar sound sequence differently in different languages. The definition of the syllable from the functional point of view existing in modern linguistics tends to single out the following features of the syllable: a) a syllable is a chain of phonemes of varying length; b) a syllable is constructed on the basis of contrast of its constituents (which is usually of vowel-consonant type); c) the nucleus of a syllable is a vowel, the presence of consonants is optional; there are no languages in which vowels are not used as syllable nuclei, however, there are languages in which this function is performed by consonants; d) the distribution of phonemes in the syllabic structure follows the rules which are specific enough for a particular language. жүктеу/скачать 221,88 Kb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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