Languages & Linguistics
Multisyllabic
Multisyllabic refers to words that have more than one syllable. In linguistics, the study of multisyllabic words involves analyzing their structure, stress patterns, and phonological characteristics. Understanding multisyllabic words is important for language learners and educators as it impacts pronunciation, fluency, and comprehension in speech and reading.
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7 Key excerpts on "Multisyllabic"
eBook - PDF- Ernst Pulgram(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Indeed their shapes are predictable since they rest entirely upon phonotactic criteria, which are in turn derivable, as will be seen presently, from an analysis of the language into genuinely functional contrastive units. That is to say, once the analyst has found out what the phonemes, morphemes, and lexemes are, and how the representatives of each type are arranged into higher units, and once he has derived from this analysis phonotactic rules on what phonemes stand next to one another in what units, he actually possesses already the basic knowledge of how to syllabize an utter-ance, even though some indispensable refinements will have to be added — as will be demonstrated in Chapter 3A. I am therefore suggesting that the term 'syllable' is not to be used in either a phonetic or a phonemic sense, but rather that it names a linguistic unit composed of phonemes that are arranged according to certain phonotactic criteria. A syllable is, in other words, a phonological unit that is, as all linguistic units must be, describable and definable on its own level of analysis exclusively. 22 In the discussion of my paper read at the Phonetics Congress of 1964, THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT 23 If the syllable is an operative unit of all languages, it is also a universal of language. Its definition must be, like that of the phoneme, the morpheme, and other linguistic units, the same for all languages, regardless of the varying unit inventories in the different idioms. But since the definition of the syllable in any language is in fact a statement about syllabic boundaries exclusively, and since this statement must be a phonotactic rule on the consonants that may occur in the same syllable as does the vowel nucleus, there arises the interesting question whether it might not be possible to arrive at a phonotactic definition of the syllable which, unlike the formerly attempted but generally aborted phonetic definitions of it, does have universal validity for all languages.
- Shelece Easterday(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Language Science Press(Publisher)
1 Syllables and syllable structure A syllable is typically thought of as a unit which speakers use to organize se-quences of sounds in their languages. The division of the speech stream into syllables refects the higher levels o f organization which are used in the cogni-tive processes by which speech is planned and perceived. Syllables are a common unit of abstract linguistic analysis; however, this unit seems to be more concrete and accessible to speakers than other phonological units such as segments. A speaker’s intuition of what is a pronounceable sequence of sounds is strongly infuenced by the syllable patterns o f the language they speak. Most languages have relatively simple syllable patterns, in which the alternation between rel-atively closed (consonantal) and relatively open (vocalic) articulations is fairly regular: syllable patterns such as those in the English words pillow , cactus , and tree are crosslinguistically prevalent. Compare these patterns to the examples below (1–5): (1) Yakima Sahaptin ( Sahaptian ; USA) ksksa ‘elephant ear (mushroom)’ (Hargus & Beavert 2006: 29) (2) Georgian ( Kartvelian ; Georgia) bɾt͡s’χ’ali ‘claw’ (Butskhrikidze 2002: 204) (3) Tashlhiyt ( Afro-Asiatic ; Morocco) tsːkʃfstː t-sː-kʃf-t=stː ‘you dried it (f)’ (Ridouane 2008: 332) (4) Tehuelche ( Chonan ; Argentina) kt͡ʃaʔʃpʃkn k-t͡ʃaʔʃp-ʃ-k’n refl-wash-p s-realis ‘it is being washed’ (Fernández Garay & Hernández 2006: 13) 1 Syllables and syllable structure (5) Itelmen ( Chukotko-Kamchatkan ; Russia) kɬtxuniŋeʔn kɬ-txuni-ŋeʔn ‘very dark’ (Georg & Volodin 1999: 55) To speakers of most languages, the long strings of consonants in these ex-amples are not pronounceable without a great deal of practice, being so di fer-ent from the relatively simpler patterns that are crosslinguistically prevalent. Yet such patterns are fuently acquired and maintained by native speakers o f these languages, and may even be relatively frequent in those languages.
eBook - PDF- Lynne Cahill(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
What I love about syllables is that everyone who speaks a language has an idea of what a syllable is, and is usually able to identify how many syllables there are in a word, but when you try asking them anything detailed about syllables, they suddenly realise that they don’t really know very much about them at all, or what they thought they knew turns out to be wrong. This is where you can show off to your friends with your superior linguistic knowledge (well, assuming that you have the kind of friends who are impressed by this sort of thing)! The Oxford English Dictionary defines a syllable as ‘a vocal sound or set of sounds uttered with a single effort of articulation and forming a word or an element of a word; each of the elements of spoken language comprising a sound of greater sonority (vowel or vowel equivalent) with or without one or more sounds of less sonority (consonants or consonant equivalents).’ There are two different kinds of definitions here, separated by the semicolon. The first one offers different options at two points. It is a vocal sound or set of sounds – so it is a set which may consist of a single sound. It forms a word or an element of a word – so a word might consist of one or more syllables. All of this is fine, but it doesn’t say anything about how to spot whether a word has one or more syllables, nor how many sounds might be combined into any particular syllable. The next part of the definition helps a bit more and gets into the more technical side. A syllable is an element of language that comprises a sound of greater sonority possibly combined with some sounds of less sonority. This is starting to look like something more helpful. It dif-ferentiates between vowels and consonants, but crucially it also allows for vowel-like and consonant-like sounds. As you’ll soon see, it is important not to be fooled into thinking that vowels and consonants can be easily divided into two clearly distinct, mutually exclusive groups of sounds.
eBook - PDFStudies by Einar Haugen
Presented on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, April 19, 1971
- Evelyn S. Firchow(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
He also gives an example from Mixteco to show a situation in which distribution is best handled in terms of morphemes rather than syllables. 16 This is a case of vowel harmony between successive syllables, and need not involve any description of morphemes (at least as far as the data there presented are concerned). Without denying the possibility of coincidences between syllabic and morphemic boundaries, one can surely say that in most if not all languages, the two are distinct. In English there are morphemes of all degrees of complexity from single phonemes and up. Even in the so-called 'monosyllabic' Chinese, there are polysyllabic mor-phemes. If syllables exist, they must be defined independently of the morpheme, in terms of purely phonological criteria. It will then be possible to consider any possible coincidences of the two as a morphophonemic problem. 2.5. Definition. — The preceding sections have shown that the syllable is not iden-tical with the number of vowels, accents, junctures, or morphemes. Each of these can be defined in its own terms independently of the syllable. One would be tempted to deny its existence, or at least its linguistic status, as some have done, were it not for its wide persistence as a feature of most linguistic descriptions. The key to cur understanding of the syllable lies in the development of phonotactics, or the study of phonemic distribution. 16 Previous attempts at defining it did not provide a frame-work in which the syllable could be placed. To speak of a 'phonemic' syllable is unclear if we do not know what kind of a unit the syllable is. It is not, like the phoneme, a contrastive unit; it is a SEQUENCE OF PHONEMES which together constitute a unit. This is the spirit in which Hockett has treated it in his recent Manual of Phonology, where he has placed it in a hierarchy of immediate constituents.
eBook - PDFA Manual of English Phonetics and Phonology
Twelve Lessons with an Integrated Course in Phonetic Transcription
- Paul Skandera, Peter Burleigh(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Narr Francke Attempto Verlag(Publisher)
No English word, and, again, no English syllable, ends with more than four consonants, and, as before, many consonant combinations are not possible in word-final position. Phonologically, the English syllable can thus be described (with a capital ‘C’ represent- ing a consonant, and a capital ‘V’ representing a vowel) as having the maximal structure CCCVCCCC (as in strengths /streŋkθs/, although the /k/ is prone to deletion), the minimal structure V (as in are /ɑː/), or any structure in between, such as CCVC (as in stop /stɒp/), CVCC (as in cats /kæts/), and CCCVCC (as in streets /striːts/). Syllabic consonants In the previous sections, we said that the centre of a syllable is “usually” formed by a vowel. This is true, without exception, in words consisting of only one syllable, like art /ɑːt/, my /maɪ/, help /help/, and most of the other example words given in this lesson so far. As the tentative wording suggests, however, there are syllables whose centre is not formed by a vowel, but by a consonant instead. Such syllables contain no vowel at all, and the consonant forming the centre is termed syllabic consonant. This is the case in some words consisting of two or more syllables, as we shall see shortly. Before we proceed, however, a brief note on terminology: A word that consists of a single syllable is referred to as a monosyllabic word, or simply as a monosyllable. One that consists of two syllables, like clever /klev-ə/ and delay /dɪ-leɪ/, is referred to as a disyllabic or bisyllabic word, or as a disyllable or bisyllable, and one that consists of three syl- lables, like compulsive /kəm-pʌl-sɪv/ and delicious /dɪ-lɪʃ-əs/, is referred to as a trisyllabic 79 The Syllable word, or as a trisyllable. Less specifically, a word that consists of two or more syllables is also called a polysyllabic word, or a polysyllable.
eBook - PDFPhonics for Pupils with Special Educational Needs Book 7: Multisyllable Magic
Revising the Main Sounds and Working on 2, 3 and 4 Syllable Words
- Ann Sullivan(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Syllabification So far in the programme the child has encountered words containing a relatively small number of sounds which can be managed easily. The child has been taught to dynamically blend sounds and listen for a word forming. At the end of this blending process the child is rewarded by hearing a meaningful word and this is a signal that they have successfully read the word. The child has also been taught a sequential segmenting strategy for spelling. Having built up a good working knowledge of the sounds and their sound spellings in 1 syllable words, the child is ready to deal with longer and more complex words which generally contain more sounds. Splitting words up into smaller groups of sounds or syllables is called syllabification. There are many ways that teachers, academics and linguists view this. In dictionaries words are split into syllables according to etymology (the origin and meaning of words) and morphology (the structure of words in terms of roots, affixes and suffixes). However, it is far more useful for beginner readers and spellers to view syllabification in terms of phonology (the sounds in words). Even taking this route there conventionally exists a complex picture of syllabification, with a multitude of syllable types identified by linguists and rules constructed by teachers to describe how to interpret them for reading and spelling. This approach is bewildering for pupils with special educational needs who benefit from a far simpler and pragmatic approach that provides a tool for decoding and encoding (reading and spelling) these more difficult words. An easy way to describe syllables to the child is that when longer words contain lots of sounds or sounds in an awkward combination it is difficult to ‘speak’ them all in one breath or mouthful. We tend to say words in a rhythmic way, collecting sounds within the word into groups as we go. Doing this makes it easier for us to say long words or words containing sounds in awkward combinations.
eBook - ePub- Philip B. Gough, Linnea C. Ehri, Rebecca Treiman, Philip B. Gough, Linnea C. Ehri, Rebecca Treiman(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
4 The Role of Intrasyllabic Units in Learning to Read and SpellRebecca TreimanWayne State UniversityMany investigators have proposed that children’s knowledge of spoken language plays an important role in their acquisition of printed language (e.g., Gough & Hillinger, 1980; Liberman, 1983). Therefore, studies of the structure of spoken language provide an important foundation for studies of the way that children learn to read and write. In this chapter, I focus on one particular aspect of spoken language structure—phonological units that are intermediate in size between syllables and phonemes. I ask what role these units might play in learning to read and spell. The first section of the chapter reviews the linguistic status of intrayliabic units. I then discuss the role of these units in the development of phonological awareness in children. Next, I consider the effects of intrasyliabic units on the way that children learn to read and spell. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how children’s awareness of intrasyliabic units might be put to use in the teaching of reading and spelling.THE STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH SYLLABLEUntil recently, there was little discussion of the syllable within the field of linguistics. Some linguists mentioned the syllable only to ignore it; others asserted that the syllable played no role in phonological organization. In recent years, linguists have begun to pay more attention to syllables and their structure. There are several competing views about the structure of the syllable. One position (e.g., Hooper, 1972) is that the syllable is a linear string of phonemes. In this view, there are no levels of structure intermediate between the syllable and the phoneme. This idea is depicted in the top panel of Fig. 4.1 by reference to the English words stigma (/stI ’gmə/) and task (/tæsk/).1
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