Syllable, Word, Nexus, Cursus 9783110815443, 9789027907066

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SYLLABLE, WORD, NEXUS, CURSUS

JANUA LINGUARUM STUDIA M E M O R I A E NICOLAI VAN WIJK DEDICATA edenda curai

C. H. VAN S C H O O N E V E L D INDIANA

UNIVERSITY

SER1ES M I N O R 81

1970

MOUTON THE H A G U E • PARIS

SYLLABLE, WORD, NEXUS, CURSUS by

ERNST PULGRAM T H E U N I V E R S I T Y OF M I C H I G A N

1970

MOUTON THE H A G U E • PARIS

© Copyright 1970 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 75-106460

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

PREFACE

This essay began as an investigation of the syllable, which is one of the pivotal segments in most synchronic and diachronic linguistic analyses. Nonetheless, linguists sometimes recoil from using it on theoretical grounds, either because they believe (wrongly, I think) that it is a non-linguistic concept, or because they are aware of the absence of a satisfactory linguistic description and definition of it. Yet the fact is that the syllable can and must be established as an operational unit in linguistics, not only for its own sake, but also because of its involvement with other structural features. In Latin, for example, the syllable plays a role in the formulation of descriptive and historical rules on the placement of the accent, on vocalic and consonantal quantity, on syllabic quantity, and on metrics. But my research on certain problems of Latin historical phonology showed that classicists, philologists, and even modern linguists had not really developed an adequate basic theory of the syllable, to say nothing of having reached a consensus on it, whether for Latin or for other idioms. The reason for this lack is of course neither incompetence nor sloth on the part of all scholars concerned, but the common assumption — far too facile, it turned out — that everyone knew what the syllable was, or even in some cases the conviction that no one needed to know what it was. This ultimate resignation was sometimes sustained by the view that there was no such thing anyway. One of the most important results of my own search for an answer about the syllable was the realization (which shows in the title and the content of the present work) that the syllabation of an utterance in any language has to be performed with reference to larger, morphonological units and their boundaries, that the

6

PREFACE

problem of syllabation is not yet solved if one learns how to divide a lexeme into syllables. This conclusion was confirmed by, and ir turn it strengthened, the recognition that the syllable, although it is plainly a universal of speech, cannot be described in universal phonetic (acoustic, articulatory) terms, but that, rather, each idiom has its own rules for shaping, bounding, and signaling its syllabic units. The linguist's task was, it appeared, not to seek the phonetic syllable, but to determine what these larger, morphonological units are and how one can identify them, to state their hierarchical relations among themselves and to the syllable, and to assign them a place in various language types. Since my text is addressed to readers of diverse degrees of learning, including students, I preferred to make it explicit (but not, I hope, prolix) rather than elliptic, advancing arguments in small steps and leisurely for the sake of continuity and completeness, even at the risk of expounding what may be already familiar to some readers. Beside the information derived from the numerous written sources, acknowledged in the customary bibliographical references, I have received aid and stimulation from the participants in a seminar which I conducted at the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, at the University of Michigan, in the summer of 1965: Miss Cornelia Carnes, Messrs Edward N. Burstynsky, Allan Grundstrom, Orlando Reyes-Cairo, and Pablo Valencia. To them I am grateful for their contributions, but none of them is responsible for any shortcomings of my endeavors. A portion of the research and of the writing of this book was done during a Sabbatical Leave granted by the University of Michigan in the academic year 1965/66. During that time, as indeed on several earlier occasions, I was fortunate in enjoying the hospitality of the American Academy in Rome (under the directorship of Mr Richard A. Kimball) and could use its excellent library (headed capably and engagingly by Mrs. Nina Longobardi). Also the Istituto di Glottologia of the University of Rome (under Professor Tullio De Mauro) allowed me free access to its collection.

PREFACE

7

To these institutions and to these persons I am most grateful for their assistance in various ways. I do of course not pretend to have dealt with, or even raised, all germane problems in all languages; for one thing, I do not know all problems, let alone all languages. But this risk of deficiency and oversight is common to all who venture generalizations and occupy themselves with universals. Yet I hope that the basic theory and procedures here proposed may, albeit with amendments where needed, prove sound, and that, if I have not given all the answers, I have at least provoked questions which will generate knowledge. Ann Arbor, January 1968.

E.P.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

5

Signs and abbreviations

10

1. The syllable as a linguistic unit

11

2. Word, nexus, and cursus as morphonological units . . .

24

3. The syllable as a subunit of the section A. Phonotactic syllabation B. Rules of syllabation C. Phonetic signaling of syllable boundaries D. Definition of the syllable

40 40 48 52 65

4. Specification and elaboration of the rules of syllabation . A. The open syllable B. Syllable-final vowels C. Consonant cluster, consonant sequence D. The irregular coda E. Division of interludes on statistical criteria

66 66 75 78 80 82

5. Applications, illustrations, problems A. Word-language, nexus-language, cursus-language . . B. Permissible and non-permissible clusters and sequences C. Geminates D. Syllabation and disjuncture

85 85 90 105 Ill

Bibliography

125

Index of authors cited

130

SIGNS AND ABBREVIATIONS

/.../ phonemic transcription. [...] phonetic transcription. /...—.../ phonemir syllable boundary. [...—...], (...£!...], [ . . . = . . . ] phonetic syllable boundary (explained below, Chapter 3B, p. 48, and Chapter 3C, p. 63). [... C-C ...] plosive consonant with syllable boundary lying between implosive and explosive phase (explained below, Chapter 3B, p. 49, and Chapter 3C, p. 63). -- morpheme boundary. --- morpheme boundary and syllable boundary coinciding, (blank space) word boundary •> nexus boundary I section boundaries | || cursus boundaryJ V vowel C consonant WL word language NL nexus language C L cursus language CL-S with obliteration of segmental identity of word CL-SS with obliteration of segmental and suprasegmental identity of word.

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THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT

Conscience, courtesy, and caution require that anyone wishing to concern himself with the syllable read all, or at least most, of the enormous literature on it. But a fair portion of this literature is, in the light of today's linguistics, partly or wholly obsolete. Moreover, despite the sheer bulk of the debate, competent modern linguists have, with some notable exceptions, not contributed extensively or systematically to it. Some treatises even came to the dismaying conclusion that the syllable does not exist;1 this extreme view most linguists and laymen reject. Others, though admitting its existence, say that the syllable is of no interest in linguistics;2 this position is, surely, untenable: if the syllable exists, linguistics must occupy itself with it. But mostly the syllable has been employed in synchronic and diachronic investigations without being defined — on the assumption, it seems, that everyone knows what it is.3 Everyone does not know. And not infrequently, the syllable is given a pseudo-definition. For example, it may be stated that each syllable contains one vowel — and then the vowel is defined as the kind of sound that forms the nucleus of a syllable; and to make 1

For example, Kohler 1966, a thesis which I find unconvincing, especially since it disregards the preceding literature on the subject. "... it can be demonstrated that the syllable is either an UNNECESSARY concept, because the division into such units is known for other reasons, or an IMPOSSIBLE one, as any division would be arbitrary, or even a HARMFUL one, because it clashes with grammatical formatives." (207). Proof for all these grave matters is somewhat rashly adduced on one page. NOTE: References in the footnotes are identified by the name of the author, year of publication, and pagination. If two or more publications by an author are of the same date, each is further identified by a word of the title. Details are to be found in the Bibliography, pp. 125-129. 4 For example, Lebrun 1966. 8 For a recent example, see below, Chapter 3, fn. 13.

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THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT

matters worse, it is often forgotten that the same phoneme may function as either vowel or consonant, as for example Czech /I/ in los 'elk' and vlk 'wolf', where in the second word /I/ (not /v/, for reasons of Czech distribution, and certainly not /k/) must be regarded as the syllable nucleus, else the word consists of zero syllables, which is absurd. Or it is affirmed that a phoneme undergoes historic change or substitution depending on its position in the syllable (initial, medial, final) — and then the syllable boundary is stated on no other evidence than the development of that phoneme. 4 The layman always knows that his language has syllables, but of course he cannot define the syllable; and if he can tell with some assurance how many syllables there are in an utterance, he cannot, if put to it, say always exactly between what neighboring sounds he would place a syllable boundary, nor would all speakers agree on this boundary (except perhaps in accordance with rules of orthographic division that they learned in school and that are irrelevant to the linguist). 5 And since very few linguists are so undiscriminating as to be satisfied with current syllabation procedures that are not the same in all linguistic writings, or so unscientific as to be content to operate with an essentially undefined term and unit of analysis, or so unobservant as to be unaware of the inherent problem, the majority, loath to tread where the layman * An extensive survey of opinions on, and definitions of, the syllable is to be found in Hâla 1961, 72-83. Durand 1954, 527, gives some examples of definitions from the 18th to the 20th century, and concedes melancholically : "Il faut bien avouer que les définitions contemporaines sont aussi sibyllines que celles du XVIII° siècle. Toutes parlent de groupement, mais sans préciser la nature du lien qui unit les phonèmes [dans une syllabe]." 6 Preoccupation with orthography and disregard of speech is the besetting sin in the grammatical theories, including those dealing with the syllable, of ancient grammarians (to whom Ypàwia and littera meant both 'sound' and 'letter'): cf. Hermann 1923, 125, 128. Syllabaries, which are of course orthographies and are not based upon a linguistic analysis of an utterance into syllables, cannot be relied upon to furnish accurate information on the syllables of the languages which they reduce to writing: regular coincidence of the orthographic syllable with the linguistic syllable can be assumed no more, or at best only slightly more but still without certainty, than can the coincidence of the grapheme with the phoneme in alphabetic types of writing.

THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT

13

rushes in, are generally prey to a vague discomfiture and malaise whenever they come upon the syllable as readers or authors. Surveying the variety of opinions, perceiving the difficulties encountered in dealing with the syllable in linguistic theory, and yet acknowledging the constancy and inevitability of its use in linguistic practice, especially in accounts on suprasegmentals, or prosodies,® one is inclined to conclude, paraphrasing Voltaire's dictum about God, that Si la syllabe n'existait pas, il faudrait Vinventer.1 Let us posit an invented utterance that consists of three morphemes and nine phonemes, thus: /a--beki-- potu/. This utterance can therefore be analyzed, on different levels, as one linguistic unit (say, a single lexeme), three units (morphemes), or nine units (phonemes). But it is doubtful that anyone, layman or linguist, would much hesitate to divide it also into five units of which each contains a vowel, thus: /a-be-ki-po-tu/. Nor would anyone deny that every such unit is what one generally calls a syllable.8 It appears that, while the syllabic unit may be coextensive with a phoneme or a morpheme (the first syllable of /a-.-be-ki-.-po-tu/ is both), it need not be (the other syllables in my example are neither); nor need it be coextensive with a lexeme. That non-coincidence of the syllable with any of the existing and defined linguistic units applies not only to an artificial example • Cf. Haugen 1949, 280 and 281: "... I do not believe a valid analysis of prosodic phenomena can be made without some implicit or explicit definition of the syllable. Without the syllable, the factors of timing [pauses, phonological quantity, stress placement, pitch placement] are meaningless." "Stress, pitch, duration and juncture — all of them are somehow related to the syllable." For a concrete confirmation of this opinion see Pulgram 1965 (Prosodic). 7 Cf. Haugen 1956,215-216: "One would be tempted to deny its [the syllable's] 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." 8 There is some artifice — employed for the sake of simplicity — in my using an example where not only vowels and consonants follow one another in regular alternation, but also the morphemes end in vowels. The question on how to syllabize if the word consisted of the morphemes /ab--ekip--otu/, or if indeed this were an utterance consisting of the three lexemes ab ekip otu, will be crucial in the phonotactic view of the syllable I shall propose. For the moment, the concern is only with the establishment of the syllable concept itself.

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THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT

but also to natural languages is easily demonstrated. The phoneme as a coterminous unit is clearly out of contention, not only because lots of phonemes are consonants hence incapable of constituting by themselves a syllable (a view on which all agree no matter what their position as to the nature of the syllable; more on this will be said below), but also because equating each phoneme in an utterance with a syllable is palpably nonsensical and useless. A morpheme can be polysyllabic {story) or non-syllabic (the English plural marker in hats); hence the equation of syllable and morpheme is at best impractical, because the rule on syllabation would then have to read: 'The syllable is coextensive with the morpheme unless ...' — and the restrictions after 'unless' would cover the vast majority of morphemes that are not coextensive with syllables. It is far preferable to begin with the statement that the syllable is not the same as the morpheme (and there are, in addition to noncoextensiveness, also other cogent linguistic arguments which favor this approach), unless a given morpheme just happens to satisfy the definition of the syllable. And the objections to equating syllable boundaries with morpheme boundaries apply a fortiori to all higher units, which are by definition composed of morphemes. The syllable must therefore, if it exists, be defined as an independent unit, and its boundaries must be stated in terms of itself, and not of another unit. If therefore it can be demonstrated that every utterance is segmentable into pieces like /a-be-ki-po-tu/; if procedural and heuristic rules can be formulated on how to segment an utterance in this way; if it can be shown that these segments form a definable and circumscribable class of linguistic units; and if these units turn out to be sensible and useful in linguistic analysis, both synchronically and diachronically — then surely the syllable has been vindicated, its existence as a linguistic unit proven, and its nature specified. It will also have been shown to be a linguistic universal. A linguistic unit is the class of its occurrences in speech. It is phonemic, or morphemic, or lexemic, or syntagmemic, etc., in short, an emic unit. The establishment of boundaries between emic

THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT

15

units, that is, the segmentation of an utterance, is therefore an operation of analysis taking place at the level to which the unit to be extrapolated belongs. But it is under all circumstances an emic operation. In other words, when we speak of segmenting an utterance into units of one kind or another, we mean that we extract emic pieces that are identifiable by the class to which they belong; we generally do not mean that we also determine, or even need to determine, phonetic boundaries between the units, for the simple reason that we cannot do so since the units need not be, though they sometimes are, set off against one another by specific phonetic boundary signals. A class of any kind, be it 'tree' or 'hunger' or '/s/', which stands for 'treeness' or 'hungerness' or '/s/-ness', as it were, has no physical boundaries; a class is 'bounded' by its definition, which regulates what things or events may be viewed as members of that class. Only the individual members of the class — 'that tree over there' or 'the hunger that I now feel' or '[s]' — have real physical boundaries. But even so it must be noted that individual phones, members of various phoneme classes, cannot easily and cannot always be bounded against one another in the actual utterance; instead, they mostly merge into one another in a continuous flow of articulation. For this phenomenon the phrase "stream of speech but chain of phonemes" is particularly felicitous.9 Since every linguistic unit either is a phoneme or is made up of segmental phonemes (I am excluding for the time being nonsegmental and non-segmentable units like prosodemes), the boundary between two units lies necessarily between two phonemes. And units longer than a single phoneme (the great majority of 9 Cherry 1956, 62. Cf. also Pike 1952, 619: "It is impossible for us to identify accurately [i.e., phonetically] the borders between the segments since the movements slur from one to the other; nor is it necessary for us to do so for linguistic purposes. Rather we choose a symbol, one for each trough or crest of such a movement, and tentatively define such a phonetic symbol by the characteristics of the sound as if it were stationary at the crest or trough of movement, plus — where it seems especially important to communication — its on-glide and off-glide." See also Pilch 1964, Chapter 4, on segmentation, especially p. 86. For a more optimistic view on the acoustic segmentability of speech see Lisker 1957. For a survey and literature see Fay 1966.

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THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT

morphemes and higher units) are bounded by those phonemes, or groups of phonemes, that occur typically at the beginning and at the end of the unit in a given language; that is, they are bounded in accordance with the rules of phoneme distribution valid in that language. Hence the phonetic conditions prevailing at the boundaries of the etic occurrence of the emic units can be discovered and discussed only AFTER the segmentation into emic units has been performed. It would be senseless to attempt the discovery of boundaries in speech, or in a direct visual recording of speech (kymogram, oscillogram, spectrogram, etc.), BEFORE the units to be bounded, whatever their level, have been extracted through linguistic analysis. Naturally, since the analyst's raw material is a series of acoustic signals, this does not mean that the physical data are of no consequence in the linguistic analysis. In practice, as every fieldworker knows, the linguist moves constantly back and forth between the raw data and their classification into linguistic units, weighing them and adjusting them to one another, until he has found an analysis that does justice to both the collected etic data and the emergent emic structure. There is, at least heuristically, no priority or precedence for either; but of course the resultant descriptive statement must be shaped in such a way that it identifies clearly the various distinctive emic units at a given level. In the end, the etic material and the emic statement must form a whole in which, as it was phrased long ago by Meillet, tout se tient. If, then, the syllable is a legitimate linguistic unit at all, its boundaries must first be stated in emic terms, the linguist must find out what phonemes compose the syllable and what phonemes bound it; only thereafter comes the etic examination of its content and its boundaries. It follows that each language has its own, typical syllabic shapes, as it has its own, typical shapes on other levels. But this implies that the kind of search for the etic nature of the syllable which precedes rather than follows the identification of the syllable as a unit in a given language, is a theoretical and procedural hysteron proteron, comparable to the attempted segmentation of an utterance into phones and morphs without prior discovery of the phonemes

THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT

17

and morphemes of the language in which the utterance is made, comparable (in a different domain) to an attempted fixing of the graphic boundaries of letters in a cursive alphabetic script before the number and kinds of letters, or graphemes, of that particular alphabet have been determined. (In this simile I insist on cursive writing as opposed to printing by means of discrete types. Indeed a spoken utterance between pauses is always cursive, as it were; phones are for the most part not discrete units.) Yet past research has concerned itself chiefly with the phonetic properties of the syllable. Scholars have tried to discover what articulatory or acoustic or physiological phenomena constituted a syllable and syllable boundaries before rather than after examining what syllabicity is phonologically. Moreover, authors did not apply this procedure to just one language at a time, but rather sought phonetic universals. Although in the search for universals, especially of the etic kind, we have learned to step lightly and cautiously, it seems that the lesson is often forgotten with regard to the syllable: many linguists hastened to get at the physical nature of the syllable, to determine what physical events signal a syllable boundary in human language rather than in various languages. Hence the criteria for the definition of the syllable most frequently suggested have been of the physical kind, precisely the sort which in the definition of all other functional, emic linguistic units we are likely to shun, or at least to regard as accessory (though of course not for that reason uninteresting). Thus we find attempts to define and bound the syllable by means of vocalic sonority (Jespersen), articulatory opening of the vocal tract (de Saussure), physiological tenseness and laxness of the speech organs (Grammont), thoracic pressure (Peterson), chest pulses induced by muscular activity (Stetson, Durand), voice (Rosetti).10 The choice of such parameters makes the syllable, not a functional, linguistically pertinent unit, but a physical one. And of course that kind of syllable can indeed 10

Cf. Malmberg 1963 (Phonetics), 66-69. See especially Ladefoged 1962, 73-81, on the chest pulse theory (81: "... there is insufficient basis for the chest pulse theory of the syllable..."), and passim on subglottal acitity in general. See also Trim 1962, on the increasing skepticism shown by linguists toward the simple identification of physical events with linguistic phenomena.

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THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT

not figure in the emic description of the language, and it cannot be referred to for either synchronic or diachronic purposes — and that is presumably the reason why some linguists denied it linguistic status altogether. They did so, I believe, because the definitions and descriptions of the syllable suggested so far, have dealt with physical facts exclusively. And it is no wonder that attempts to apply one or the other of such basically unsatisfactory and insufficient universal criteria to the syllabation of a specific language resulted in disappointment and failure.11 With respect to universality of physical criteria, one eminent linguist conceded more than a decade ago (without, however, thereby arresting further efforts in the same vein) that "...the attempt to find phonetic criteria for syllable division appears to be futile."12 Not that this dilemma remained unperceived by scholars. One warns: "Es ist dringend notwendig, dass man sich klar macht, was fur eine Hybride die Silbe ist. Sie hat einen phonetischen Kern und phonemisch und distributional bestimmte Grenzen."13 But this is true of every linguistic unit, although I should prefer to phrase it differently, namely, that a linguistic unit, being a class of events, has an emic shape and emic boundaries, whereas its attestations have necessarily etic shapes and etic boundaries. In other words, the terms Kern and Grenzen are not felicitous, leading one to believe that there is something etic about the interior and emic about the boundaries of a unit. It is better to oppose class and attestation, with the former being all emic, the latter all etic. The syllable is therefore no more a hybrid than any other unit; only most of its describers have viewed it from an exclusively etic point of view, omitting its emic nature. Hence the problem is more clearly stated by saying "... dass eine gewisse Schwierigkeit bei der 11 For example, Delattre 1940 operated with effort articulatoire, différence d'aperture, force articulatoire, loi du moindre effort in order to divide French into syllables — and I rather doubt he would use the same procedure today, more than a quarter century later; but even then he could not but arrive at the conclusion that no rules of syllabation could be stated by these means. " Haugen 1956, 196. a Jensen 1963, 34.

THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT

19

Begriffsbestimmung der 'Silbe' bisher daran gelegen hat, dass man mit dem Ausdruck 'Silbe' sowohl einen phonetischen als auch einen phonologischen Begriff gemeint hat, ganz ähnlich wie beim Begriff 'Laut'. Dabei zeigt es sich, dass, wie nicht jeder 'Laut' in der Sprache ein 'Laut' (will sagen 'Phonem') ist, so ist nicht jede 'Silbe' (will sagen 'Schallgipfel') in jeder Sprache eine 'Silbe'".14 Durand, for example, worries at length whether the meaningless string skuks is one syllable or more than one; her answer, that it is one syllable, is based on an entirely phonetic argument that culminates in the definition of the syllable as "un groupe pris ensemble ... dans une même pulsation des muscles respiratoires",16 which reminds one of Stetson's definition involving chest pulses.18 But determining the syllabic nature of skuks is, to my mind, a pseudo-problem; it becomes a genuine one only when the language of which skuks is a unit is identified, and then the answer has to be given in terms of that language, and in particular, as will be shown, with regard to phoneme distribution.17 My own position rather " Koschmieder 1952, 291. I do not agree with the definition of the emic syllable as Schallgipfel: a syllable contains a Schallgipfel (vocalic nucleus), and only one, but it is not defined thereby because nothing is said about its boundaries and its function. " Durand 1954, 527-531, 533. 16 Stetson 1951. See above, fn. 10. 17 No further proof is needed for the fact that skuks may be one syllable to a speaker of English; that it will be interpreted as bisyllabic by the speaker of a language (like Spanish) that does not have initial /sk/ ([(s)s-kuks]), and trisyllabic if the language has neither initial /sk/ nor final /ks/ ([(a)s-ku-ks(a)] or, if there is no initial /ks/ either [(a)s-kuk-s(3)]), and tetrasyllabic if the language has neither initial clusters, nor final clusters, nor single final consonants ([(3)s-ku-k(3)-s(9)]. German bisyllabic Pause /pây-zs/ [pâu-za] sounds trisyllabic [pà-u-za] to a Russian who knows no diphthong [ay]. Suaheli simba 'lion' is syllabized si-mba by a Suaheli, who has initial /mb/ in his idiom, but as a loan in German (often used as a proper name for circus and zoo lions) it is sim-ba because German has no initial /mb/. The German phrase kluge Knaben /klu:-g>knâ:-ban/ [klu:-gsknâ:-ban] 'smart boys' will be heard by a speaker of English as [klu:-g9k-nâ:ban], provided there is no pause between the two German lexemes, because he neither says nor hears /kn/ [kn] in the same syllable (cf. the English cognate knave /nev/). Under these circumstances the search for the phonetic syllable must indeed remain futile. I should like to call attention to the parenthetic proviso in the preceding paragraph, concerning the absence of a pause between the two lexemes. (Later

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THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT

agrees with the following: "If the results of a search for acoustic syllable cues are to have linguistic validity, the search should start out from a linguistic definition of the syllable. Only when segments have been defined linguistically, can we proceed to match acoustic clues with the segments. The use of the term 'syllable' for both an acoustic and a linguistic segment may lead to confusion."18 Indeed it has long since done so. It is quite true "dass der Silbenbegriff, wenn er überhaupt sinnvoll ist, nur in Funktion zum Ganzen des Lautsystems entwickelt werden kann und nur im Lautsystem einer Sprachgemeinschaft Gültigkeit hat."19 Of course this reasoning does not imply a denial of phonetic reality to syllable boundaries; indeed my Chapter 3C will deal with that reality in detail. It merely means that one must abandon the notion of a universal and specific phonetic signal of syllabicity, and that in fact, as I shall demonstrate later, not all phonologically determined syllable boundaries need be phonetically signaled under all circumstances (any more than do morpheme and lexeme and other boundaries) — for the reason stated above, namely, that on I shall in detail discuss such constructs, which will be called nexus. Note also that the entire phrase has but one stress.) If the German speaker does insert a pause and thus mark the boundary between kluge and Knaben, and perhaps even intensifies it with a glottal stop, as indeed he may if he so chooses, the English listener will hear this phonatory gap and interpret it as a syllable boundary, at least, possibly as a higher (morphemic, lexemic, syntactic) boundary. But now, no longer able to interpret the [k] as syllable final, nor able to hear it as an intial [k] before [n] in the same syllable, he will not (unless of course he is phonetically trained) interpret the palatal plosive noise, which he hears, as a speech sound at all, hence not articulate it if he is asked to repeat the utterance: [klu:-g3-na:-ban] is all he has heard, and says. Cf. Valencia 1966, 19 fn. 26: "When I [a native speaker of Spanish] was learning English, I found it very difficult to pronounce my teacher's name (Miss Smith), not having an 'impure s' in my native language. I invariably said Miss Esmith, which undoubtedly sounded to her as Mrs. Smith, so that she always reminded me that she was not married. She repeated her name many times, and then I suddently realized that she wanted to be called (so I thought) Miss Mith. Later, in teaching English to Spanish students, I found it useful to move the 'impure s' to the previous syllable, as it were; and a student who could not say anything but United Estates found that his pronunciation was much more acceptable if he thought that he was saying Unitets Tates." 18 Enkvist 1964, 899. " Weinrich 1958, 237.

THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT

21

emic segmentation is not necessarily based upon, or coterminous with, etic boundary signals.20 But even before he achieves a full and linguistically pertinent statement on the syllable, the linguist notes a striking peculiarity of this unit. The syllable is, like the phoneme, the kind of segment one may call figura, and not, like the morpheme or lexeme, a sign: the figura does not by and of itself convey meaning, but rather is employed to make up the meaning of the sign. Such is the purpose of the intrinsically meaningless /I/ and /i/ in pill /pll/ and peel /pil/, and also that of /fi-/ and /ku-/ in feeling /fi-lli)/ and cooling /kullg/.21 Yet there is an important difference between phoneme and syllable. The phoneme is not only a figura, but also the smallest discoverable functional unit of a language — and these two properties define it fully and make possible its segmentation out of an utterance. (I am ignoring here certain recent theoretical and practical objections, and maintain that the phoneme is a discoverable and useful unit.) Unlike the phoneme, however, the syllable, though also a figura, is not defined by a predictable functional size (it is not a minimum unit, nor a maximum unit, nor a unit consisting of a fixed number of phonemes); rather, it is describable only in terms of its own shape and its own boundaries. It has no function, no raison d'etre, apart from that of the syllabic segmentation of an utterance. It serves nothing but itself, as it were; it does not serve, immediately like a sign or mediately like a figura, the communicative purpose of language. And in this the syllable differs radically from all the other linguistic units, whether figurae or signs. (Perhaps this prima facie 'uselessness', too, has caused some linguists to repudiate it.) It might be objected that in feeling and cooling the syllables /fi-/ and /ku-/, both followed by the identical syllable /-Hi}/ are as instrumental in producing a semantic contrast as are the morphemes /fil--/ and /kul--/, or as are the phonemes /i/ and /u/ in feeling M I find myself here in essential agreement, though on different grounds, with Postal 1966, 163-165. See below, Chapter 3C, on the phonetic realization of syllable boundaries. 21 For details and bibliography onfiguraand sign see Pulgram 196S (Graphic).

22

THE SYLLABLE AS A LINGUISTIC UNIT

/fillg/ and fooling /fiillrj/. On the surface, this seems plausible. But it must be observed that /i/, /u/, /fil- -/, /ful--/, and /kul--/ derive from analyzing English into contrastive units in such a way that the boundaries of the units are the results rather than the criteria of the segmentation; the syllables /fi-/ and /ku-/, on the other hand, derive from analyzing English into units in such a way that the boundaries are the criteria of the segmentation, with the contrast inherent in the first syllables of /fi-lli)/ and /kii-llq/ resulting as an incidental by-product. I have remarked earlier that some linguists, perceiving the impossibility of describing the syllable and its boundaries in universal phonetic terms, tended to distinguish the phonetic from the phonemic syllable. But since the adjective emic, and the suffixes -emic and -eme, imply, on various levels of analysis, functional and semantic distinctiveness and contrastiveness of the units in question, the syllable is not in the same sense an emic unit: syllables of a given language are merely different from one another, but not (except incidentally and secondarily) contrast-forming, as I just noted. 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 utterance, 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. The question is, in other words, whether the phonotactic rules on syllabation might not be formulated in such a way that they are applicable to all languages, even though their implementations in the different languages must differ because of the underlying differences of phonotactics. I believe that such general phonotactic rules on syllabicity are not only possible but also necessary for the proper syllabation of any utterance in any language.

Sivertsen said: "You stated specifically that you are dealing with phonemic, not phonetic syllables. As is well known, French is commonly said not to have syllables at all, phonemically speaking. On what basis do you consider the syllable in French phonemic?" (Pulgram 1965 [Consonant], 81.) I did indeed say 'phonemic', and I should not have said it, precisely because it may evoke justified scruples and objections like Sivertsen's. For if phonemic means 'distinctive', and not just 'composed of phonemes' or 'amenable to segmentation into phonemes', then no language whatever, and not only French, has 'phonemic syllables' (except incidentally, when a syllable happens to be coextensive with a morpheme). My position will therefore be (see below for details) that the syllable is a phonological unit with phonotactically determined boundaries.

2

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

In the preceding chapter I have stated the case for considering the syllable as a legitimate linguistic unit, but I have not, beyond alluding to the necessity for fixing its boundary by phonotactic means, proposed any rules on how these boundaries are determined by the analyst, nor have I mentioned what syllable boundaries (if any) are contained in the utterance, are discovered by the linguist, and heard by the listener. Before dealing with these subjects in Chapter 3,1 shall first discuss the higher units within the utterance which I mentioned in the Preface as being involved in problems of syllabation. They are the word, the nexus, and the cursus (the terms will be defined and explained presently), and they have in common that they are identifiable in, and extractable from, discourse by a combination of morphological and phonological criteria; one may therefore call them morphonological units. It is convenient to distinguish word from lexeme, though the two are often coextensive; but the second shall connote the presence of only morphological, the first the presence of both morphological and phonological traits of identification. An isolated lexical item, a citation form, is always a word; yet it may happen that the same item appears within a piece of discourse as a lexeme, that is, without the full complementation of phonological traits that characterize the word. The lexeme may be defined, in purely morphological terms, as a minimum free form that is either (a) a single free (as opposed to bound) morpheme, like hat; or (b) a combination of one free morpheme with one or more bound morphemes, like hat—s; or (c) a combination of two or more bound morphemes, like pre— WORD.

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

25

diet, con—vey, con—tigu—ity, or (d) a polymorphemic minimum free form extended by one or more bound morphemes, like tin— predict—able, convey—once, dis—contiguity. If, in addition, each of these items is observed to have certain phonological properties, which in English are (though there may be others in other languages) one main stress, distributional constraints (none may begin with /ps/, end with /ae/, or have /hr/ in the middle), typical terminal allophones (if the terminal phoneme involved has such), an optional segmental phonetic boundary marker (silence, glottal stop), etc., then it may be called a word. 1 If ALL lexemes in ALL language occurred ALWAYS in the same segmental and suprasegmental shape, the distinction between lexeme and word would not be needed; but since they do not — see below, under nexus — the distinction is useful. — This term I shall use for a series of lexemes — lexeme defined as under (a) to (d), above — joined in such a way that the entire series behaves PHONOLOGICALLY (segmentally and suprasegmentally) like a word, though of course MORPHOLOGICALLY it is a single word no more than it is a single lexeme. The lexemes constituting the nexus are amalgamated in such a way that (1) only the first in the series has at its beginning ALL the features associated with word-initial position, (2) only the last has at its end ALL the features associated with word-final position, (3) beginnings and ends of lexemes that lie nexus-medially behave as if they were in word-medial position, (4) the suprasegmental configuration of the entire nexus is that of a single word, with those lexemes that are bereft of their suprasegmental identity becoming clitics (proclitics or enclitics) which lean (Greek KWVEIV 'to lean') upon the suprasegmentally complete lexeme for support. The implication of all this is that none of the lexemes making up the nexus is a full word since none has both the segmental and suprasegmental properties of the word; but one may say that the entire nexus is, though not NEXUS.

1

On terminal allophones see below, Chapter 3C. For a model demonstration on how to extract words from an utterance see Lehiste 1965, 173-180, and passim.

26

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

morphologically simple, a single phonological word within which the boundary signals of the lexemes are obliterated. In English, for example, a nexus has allophones typical of wordinitial and word-final position at its beginning and its end, respectively, but word-medial allophones at those points within the nexus where the component lexemes are joined — unless one of these points also happens to coincide with a phonetically marked syllable boundary;2 and it has only one main (primary, distinctive) stress.3 Whether such a nexus is spelled as a single unit, like overlook, or as two units with or without a dash, like counter-spy or an uncle, is of course irrelevant.4 (In some instances, standard orthography 1

See below Chapter 3C. ' Stresses other than the main one are, I believe, non-distinctive in both word and nexus; it is not necessary to set up four — or more, or fewer — so-called phonemic stresses in English. In the nexus lighthouse keeper, which is one phonological word, there is one main stress, with other stresses and their place statable in terms of the main stress; in the sequence of word plus nexus light housekeeper there occur two main stresses as marked, there being two phonological words, but the phonetic degree in which the two differ from one another — if they do — is, though statable, phonemically irrelevant. See Antonsen 1966 on the role of stress, and its interrelation with other suprasegmentals, in German. The arguments against the plurality of phonemic stresses in English are conveniently assembled in Chatman 1965, 67-71. See also Lieberman 1967,127-128,144,146,159,161. See also below, Chapter 2, fn. 19. 4 The very existence of the allomorphs a and an betokens the clitic character of the indefinite article, that is, the phonological unity of it with the following noun, and the absence of word boundary markers. This soldering together of indefinite article and noun may eventually lead to an etymologically false separation: from an ewt comes a sequence (pronounced the same way) a newt; a napron (cf. French nappe, napperon 'table cloth') becomes an apron-, an ekename becomes a nickname; Arabic naranj comes into Spanish as naranja and thence into French as une orange, Italian un(a) arancia (but there is also an obsolete narancia, and dialectal narantsa and narants), English an orange. (More about this in connection with its influence upon syllabation see below, p. 113.) It is of course not excluded that even the indefinite article may occur as a stressed item in an utterance, thus converting the nexus into a sequence of two words. This is phonetically easy in a man /e msen/ [e nuen]; but there is something uncomfortable about an ox /en oks/ [en oks] (precisely because the reason for an in the place of a is the nexus, which therefore one finds difficult to abolish while at the same time retaining its characteristic feature of linking of the component lexemes); one is tempted to say [e oks]; but since this is 'wrong' (an must be used before a following vowel) speakers compromise and say [e n5ks]. See also below, Chapter 5, fn. 45.

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

27

permits any one of the three possibilities: matchbox, match-box, match box.) Apart from nexus made up of nouns forming compounds (which will be discussed below in this chapter), the number and type of lexemes phonologically united into a nexus are determined by stylistic and expressive criteria. For example, the phrase | he said to me \, with one main stress on the verb, is a single nexus; but | he said \ to mé | is a sequence of two nexus; even a sequence of four words, hé said tó mé, each with its own stress, is theoretically possible, though practically unlikely. Indeed I know of no language in which every lexeme is always a word, and no lexeme ever a clitic.5 What lexical items regularly or very frequently occur as clitics depends on the language, though in most languages, it seems (provided that they have these classes* of lexemes), articles, prepositions, unstressed pronouns, and the copula are more likely than others to fall into that category.® The question, therefore, whether a lexical item is or is not a word cannot be reasonably and fruitfully answered without reference to the phonological shape of the utterance in which it occurs, and indeed of the language to which it belongs.7 * See below, Chapter 5A. For further remarks on stylistic criteria, see below in this chapter, the discussion of the cursus. • A diachronic view shows that a word may, because of a new syntactic employment, change its status. For example, the Classical Latin future cantábo existed side by side with, and was eventually replaced by, the words cantare hábeo, which were converted into a nexus cantare hábeo, whence cantaráio and French chanterai, Italian cantero, Spanish cantaré, etc. (For details see Pulgram 1963.) Two lexemes that are consistently used in a nexus compound may undergo, especially if the meaning of the nexus is no longer that of the sum of the two components, segmental phonemic changes to such a degree that one or the other lexeme is, or both lexemes are, no longer identical with the original (though the spelling may be preserved): géntle mán (/mén/) > géntkman (/man/), óx(eri)fórd (/fórd/) > Óxford (/fad/), sún dáy (/dé/) > súnday (/di/). ' See below, Chapter 5A, on language typology. Jones 1936, claims that the 'word' is a phonetically signaled entity within a larger unit in English. To prove this he cites a long and ingenious list of pairs of the type a name — an aim (61-64; a veritable mine of examples), affirming that only the 'word division' signals make a contrast possible. It is instead my contention that the members of all such pairs may in fact be pronounced homophonously, and

28

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

In a nexus, then, though the constituent lexemes d o not lose their morphological identity, they are fused into a single phonological unit: no boundary markers separate them segmentally, and suprasegmentally they behave like a single word. The phonological changes at the points of junction, that is, the conversion of terminal into medial allophones, are phenomena traditionally subsumed under the Sanskrit grammatical term sandhi, meaning literally (and significantly) 'putting together'. Thus the phrase this year, if pronounced as t w o words, has /s/ at the*end of the first w o r d ; if pronounced as a nexus, /s/ may (but need not) be replaced by /§/, with /61s/ and /Öls/ being positionally conditioned allomorphs. 8 Some languages, of which German is a g o o d example, favor nexus made up of nouns and resulting in noun compounds; others, notably the Romance languages, do not. 9 that the word division is signaled at the choice of the speaker, by phonetic means, for special purposes (e.g., clarity, emphasis). See below, Chapter 5D. 8 Here I implicitly reject the view that [dls] and [615] are different realizations of a single underlying phonological form, and that the phonemic distinction can be dispensed with. Not that this type of analysis is senseless or 'false*: indeed a morpkonological transcription would need but one basic form, with its different realizations generated by syntactic rules. But this is merely a different, not a preferable analysis of the acoustic signal; there is no gain or advantage inherent in this description over the phonemic-morphemic one. As long as /sin/ and /Sin/, or /gaes/ and /gseS/ need to be kept apart by phonemic contrast, so must /61s/ and /Sis/, despite their semantic and morphemic identity. The phonemic statement is reasonable and useful. See also Martinet 1965. * The limit of compounding of nouns into nexus is, in German, a matter of style rather than grammaticality, of performance rather than competence. A lengthy item like Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftsbeamtenswitwenvereinigung 'Association of employees' widows of the Danube Steamship Company' is not grammatically un-German (it could even be longer without being that), but stylistically monstrous. Still, the portion ending in -schaft, long as it is, is a normal and frequent (in the proper context) nexus. See also below, p. 116. Roughly, though certainly not in all details, the nexus as a phonological word reminds one of what Trager-Smith 1951, 49-50, call a phonemic clause, phonemic phrase, and phonemic word: "... a minimal complete utterance [with only one primary stress, but possibly several other stresses, and internal open juncture] may be called by the technical term phonemic clause. Since all phonemic clauses must have one or more pitch phonemes and a terminal juncture, it is possible to take these off and leave an abstraction consisting only of segmental phonemes in normal transition or with pluses [internal open junctures], accompanied by one primary stress and with the possibility of other

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

29

— While silence, or an interruption of phonation, may be used to signal word boundaries or nexus boundaries in an utterance, it is not a typical or necessary feature for the demarcation of either unit. Indeed silences may cut the stream of speech at points other than unit termini: for example, an inevitable silence accompanies the articulation of every voiceless stop. Silences may also be placed for emphasis or other expressive purposes in almost any spot of an utterance; and an unusually spasmodic style of speaking, whatever its intent, may insert a silence after every word or even after every syllable — though one can scarcely do this over a stretch of discourse without sounding unnatural or silly. There occur within a stretch of discourse, however, silences that regularly and distinctively bound morphonological units, which are CURSUS.

stresses. Such an abstraction we call a phonemic phrase.... A phonemic phrase having no plus juncture (and consequently no secondary stresses) will be called a phonemic word...." I call all these cases (provided there occur no so-called internal open junctures) nexus, or phonological words of one kind. As for internal open juncture, it may or may not occur in night rate", if it does, I shall call night rate not a nexus but two words; if it does not (in which case night rate is homophonous with nitrate — and I do affirm that the two items can be optionally homophonous) I shall call night rate a nexus. More about the relation of nexus, juncture, and syllabation below, in various places, but especially in Chapter 5D. I wish to underline, however, the following sentence in Trager-Smith 1951, SO, with which I entirely agree: "These terms [phonemic clause, phonemic phrase, phonemic word] have, it must be noted, no connotation whatsoever of morphology; they are purely phonological." This applies fully to what I call word (as opposed to lexeme), to nexus, and also to the next unit I shall speak of, the cursus, and, finally, to the syllable — whence will emerge eventually certain phonological characteristics relating the syllable, at least phonologically, to these other phonological units. See also Brekle 1966, especially 27. Nexus corresponds there to the author's Determinativkompositum, as contrasted with the syntaktische Gruppe, which corresponds to my sequence of words. All examples under the second heading have more than one primary stress, all but a few under the first heading have, like the nexus, only one primary stress. (The exceptions are apprenticeplAmber, fellow traveler, toy sdldier, woman doctor — p. 19. But these are also listed, in another column of the chart on p. 27, as "morphologisch isoliert", that is, joined in such a way that no other word may intrude between them, which makes them behave like blackboard rather than like black [Ugly] bdard. It seems to me that all the exceptions can easily occur, and are indeed more likely to occur — though there is an option — as nexus, or Determinativkomposita, with but one primary stress.) See also Lees 1963, 182.

30

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

in fact defined by these terminal silences. Such a silence may therefore be classified as a significant feature, as a phoneme, and one may call it a pause in this function. The unit bounded by pauses is then a pause group.10 Some such pauses are used for the intake of breath; but since there are generally more than one needs for breathing, and since they are quite irregularly spaced, their purpose is clearly linguistic and not biological. They are placed by the speaker according to criteria of style, hence the same utterance may be divided in different ways by different speakers, or even by the same speaker at different times. One may say |) No, ]| I didn't say || that I was too tired || to walk with you, || or || No, I didn't say that I was too tired to walk with you || all in one piece, or with various other intermediate divisions (among which some are more likely to occur than others: ... that || I was ... is scarcely to be expected). The pause group therefore may but need not be coextensive with any morphological or syntagmatical unit. Since the criterion for the placement of pauses is one of style, and since linguistics has as yet no procedure for dealing with style scientifically, the definition of the term pause group — as distinguished from its identification in discourse through the occurrence of pauses at its termini — leaves something to be desired in precision, especially since, the phonetic realization of the pause being silence, and not all silences being pauses, not all silences are pause group boundaries. One can only say that discourse is divided into pause groups by stylistic preference and intuition.11 10

For a discussion of silence as a phoneme (it is distributionally interpreted as a minimal consonant) see Weinrich 1961. Pausen are there distinguished from Grenzsignale, the latter being "positive, phonetische Elemente (Laute, Lautmodifikationen, usw.) ... niemals Pausen." (5) 11 In writing, pause group boundaries are often indicated by punctuation: comma, stop, colon, semicolon, dashes, dots, parentheses, etc. But the reader cannot always be sure where the writer intended a pause group boundary; hence a written piece of discourse can be read in different styles, indeed so different as to produce unidentical meanings. (This is of course true of all features of speech that normal orthography does not fully transcribe, from which stem our difficulties in phonemicizing, let alone phoneticizing, written records in a language no longer spoken.) In German, for example, where a comma must precede every relative clause, the sentence Die Soldaten, die nicht

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

31

The pause group can have two basic shapes: (1) there are within it smaller morphonological units, namely, words or nexus or both; (2) there are no such units within it, the pause group itself being the smallest morphonological unit. The second is what I call cursus.12 Such a cursus, however, may appear in two different forms: (a) its unity is both segmental and suprasegmental, that is, it behaves like a nexus (implicitly like a word), except that it also has, unlike the nexus (and the word) boundaries marked by pauses; this kind of cursus is therefore a nexus bounded by pauses, as it were; (b) its unity is segmental but not suprasegmental, that is, it behaves like a nexus in that internal lexeme boundaries are obliterated, but unlike a nexus not only in that it is bounded by pauses but also in that the component lexemes possess the suprasegmental features of full words; hence the lexemes in this type of cursus have no segmental autonomy, but they do have suprasegmental identity. Put differently, in the first kind of cursus all lexemes are segmentally joined, and suprasegmentally all are clitics in relation to one lexeme, as in the nexus; in the second all lexemes are still segmentally joined but suprasegmentally autonomous (except that some may become clitics and form cursus-medial nexus). Be it observed, however, that only the first cursus is, like the nexus, a single phonological word since it behaves like a word both segmentally and suprasegmentally. The reasons for uniting these two subtypes of the pause group under the same name, cursus, despite their far from slight differences, is that they are also equivalent in some respects, especially in the establishment of syllable boundaries, as will be shown.13 kämpfen wollten, wurden hingerichtet is really ambiguous as written, since it can mean (note that English orthography obviates this ambiguity) either The soldiers who did not want to fight were executed or The soldiers, who did not want to fight, were executed. Of course, disambiguation is achieved in German by means of pause group (and pitch contour) in speech, as in English. 12 On the terminological rather than the factual problem whether a single word bounded by pauses or a single nexus bounded by pauses should or should not be called a cursus, see below, Chapter 2, fn. 16, and Chapter SA. 13 It is sometimes said that, even in the absence of segmental boundary signals, suprasegmental features assume demarcative function. One may affirm that the place of the stress, for example, acts as a boundary marker, especially in

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A cursus is, then, a stylistically determined piece of discourse between pauses, in which lexeme boundaries are segmentally obliterated, while suprasegmentally the lexemes either are or are not — depending on the type of language (see end of this chapter and Chapter 5A) — like autonomous words. Words, nexus, and cursus are recognizable within, and extractable from, a stretch of speech on the basis of their respective definitions. The criteria of each definition one may call positive: their presence is necessary to assign a unit to the proper class, and they are indeed typical of this class exclusively. The phonological boundaries of the units result automatically from the analysis of the utterance; that is, once an utterance is divided into words, nexus, or cursus, the beginnings and endings of each unit emerge languages where that place is predictable: in Hungarian and Czech always on the first vowel (syllable) of the word, in Polish on the penultimate, in Latin according to the quantity of the penultimate, in French on the last (unless it is /a/), etc. This is not quite true, for in these instances the stress merely marks what vowel (syllable) of the word — first, penultimate, last — is concerned in terms of the number of vowels (syllables) in the same word that precede or follow; but it does not precisely state how many consonants lie between the stressed vowel and the beginning or the end of the word, that is, it does not really reveal where the word begins or ends. For example, in Classical Latin, which operates with cursus (the reasons for saying so will emerge in Chapter SC; see also below, end of this fn.), the somewhat unconventional (since it does not mark word boundaries, for good reasons) phonemic transcription (still to be improved upon — see the end of this footnote) /||di:ksit6ppidum6ssede:lendum||/ (geminates indicate 'long' consonants: see below, Chapter 5C) tells us that we are dealing with a cursus having four stresses (hence apparently — N.B. — of the second kind, which eliminates segmental word boundaries but retains the suprasegmental properties of words) which consists of at least four words, or if clitics are involved, words and nexus. But on merely phonological evidence of this sort (and excluding morphological, lexical, or syntactical information which is of course available to the listener), namely, the configuration of syllabic quantities and the stress placement determined by them, the phrase permits the following phonologically possible setting of word boundaries: for the first and second words, /...i--t.../, /...t--e/; for the second and third words, /...i--d.../, /...d—u.../, /••• u—m.../, /...m—e.../; for the third and fourth words, /...e—d.../> /...d--e.../> /...e—1 .../• Only information other than phonological, certainly other than that provided by the so-called demarcative stress — which therefore is not truly demarcative — confirms as correct the following three out of nine possibilities: /...t—o.../> /...m—e.../, /...e--d.../, which means that one properly interprets the phrase as being dixit oppidum

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

33

as a by-product of the analysis. But it is of interest to inquire whether these units do not also have certain segmental phonological boundary signals through which their terminals are typically marked. It is a well-known fact that together with a phoneme inventory each idiom also possesses rules on phoneme distribution, as regards both the permissible grouping of segmental phonemes within a linguistic unit, and the permissible configuration of phonemes at unit boundaries. But with respect to unit boundaries these constraints are but negative criteria, because, while a nonterminal configuration of segments precludes the presence of a boundary, a terminal configuration does not imply the presence of such a boundary. For example, since /ps/ is, in English, a nonesse delendum 'he said that the city must be destroyed' — which a person knowing Latin has been aware of from the beginning, but, again, on evidence other than purely phonological. It is worth noting that even if the phrase cited were to occur in metrical poetry, the syllabic quantities upon which the meter rests would also be useless in determining word boundaries because these quantities are reckoned without regard to word boundaries (which confirms, incidentally, the cursus nature of the phrase). For example, although the syllable containing the last /e/ stands where the meter requires a length and can do so because the syllable is long positione since the intrinsically short vowel is followed by two consonants, it is not thereby implied that either or both of these consonants, /nd/, must belong to the same word as the /e/. The syllable with the short /e/ would have the same long prosodic quantity if there lay a morphological word boundary between /n/ and /d/, as, for example, agmen ducit /agmendu:kit/ 'he leads the army'. The POSITIONE rule disregards morphological word boundaries. I shall even go one step further and argue that in a cursus composed of words with non-distinctive suprasegmental features (as is true of the stress in Classical Latin), these features are in fact neutralized and disappear, or rather, have as their locus not the component lexemes but the entire cursus — so that in a Latin cursus there will be a stress on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable according to the quantity of the penultimate syllable of the cursus. Hence the sentence originally cited ought in fact to have been transcribed /||di:ksitoppidumessede:lendum||/, whereby the argument on the demarcative capacity of the stress turns out to be not only false but also senseless since there is no word stress. But if this is so, then Latin has a cursus of the first type, which abolishes both segmental and suprasegmental boundary identification of the word. (See also below, Chapter 5A.) These matters, however, merit greater attention than they can receive in a footnote, and I hope to discuss them in detail in a forthcoming publication on Latin phonology.

34

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

initial grouping of consonants, its occurrence precludes a lexeme boundary before it: /tr6pslrj/ represents, not a nexus tray--psing, but a bimorphemic word traips(e)—ing, spelled traipsing; /dipset/ not dee--pset but deep--set, spelled deep-set; /harpslkord/ not har-psichord but harpsi—chord, spelled harpsichord (from an obsolete French harpechorde, with an intrusive /s/ of unexplained origin). On the other hand, while many English words begin with /pr/ {press), its presense does not betoken a lexeme boundary (cypress). The phonotactic terminal constraints valid in a given language for the word, apply equally to nexus and cursus, which both normally begin and end with a word terminus.14 Hence typical wordboundary phonotactics are also typical nexus-boundary and cursus-boundary phonotactics, which means that all three units have the same negative boundary criteria. However - and this is important — in the cursus the negative criteria are inevitably, ex definitione, associated with a positive phonological criterion because the cursus is bounded at either end by a phoneme of pause. If therefore word-initial and nexus-initial phoneme distribution is identical with cursus-initial, it is also identical with postpausal; and if word-final and nexus-final is identical with cursus-final, it is also identical with prepausal. (This relationship prevails, by the way, not only because, as noted, the cursus begins and ends with a word or a nexus, but also because the cursus may be coextensive with a word or a nexus.) These conclusions on negative phonological boundary criteria present us with rather an embarras de richesses of synonymous terminology (word-initial = nexus-initial = cursus-initial = postpausal, word-final = nexus-final = cursus-final = prepausal). But each term is useful and meaningful in its proper context. And I have rehearsed these phonotactic interrelations, obvious though they may be, because of the bearing they will have upon the determination of the syllable boundary. 14

I say 'normally', because under special and relatively rare circumstances it is not impossible for a nexus or a cursus, or even a single-word utterance, to end (scarcely to begin) with the middle of a word ("You godda..."). But these are clearly marginal and extraordinary phenomena, sometimes intended for stylistic effects, sometimes accidental.

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

35

Of the three units — word, nexus, cursus — only the last has therefore positive boundary markers on the phonological level, namely, pauses; the other two have negative boundary markers on the phonological level, namely, distributional constraints. But all three of them may have phonetic boundary markers, namely, typical terminal allophones (provided that the phoneme standing in terminal position has such positionally conditioned variants), or phonetic silence, or even both together. But inside the nexus and the cursus all internal word boundary markers are neutralized by definition. All this raises now the interesting question whether languages have words, nexus, and cursus haphazardly and promiscuously, or whether the linguist can discover a typological regularity and patterning in the occurrence of these phonological units. An analysis of French, for example, discloses that each pause group is in fact a cursus (called breath group in most French grammars), in which every component word loses both its boundaries and its suprasegmental properties (in particular the lexeme stress on the last syllable). Of course the first word in the cursus retains whatever terminal signals at its beginning it may be capable of, and so does the last word at its end; and the last word also receives the expected stress on the final syllable (unless the syllable nucleus is /a/, in which case the stress moves to the penult — but the tendency toward oxytony in modern French shows itself in the increasingly frequent disappearance of final /a/ over the past several centuries). The French cursus is therefore in both respects, segmental and suprasegmental, a single word, hence a true phonological word.16 The lexical word exists as a phonological word only if it is also a cursus, that is, bounded by pause phonemes, like "Non.", or "Demain.".16 Another example of this type of cursus language is Classical Latin.17 15

For details see Pulgram 1965 (Prosodic). Since French operates with cursus exclusively, never with nexus or words, a pause group that resembles a nexus or a word in terms of its morphological shape is, in French and similarly structured other cursus languages, best called a cursus. 17 See above, Chapter 2, fn. 13. 11

36

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

The kind of language where in a cursus the segmental word boundaries are obliterated but the suprasegmental individuality of the word (excepting clitics) is preserved, that is, where the cursus is not a true phonological word, may be illustrated by Sanskrit.18 (Indeed Sanskrit grammarians gave us the term sandhi, referring to the phenomenon which, by abolishing word boundary markers, joins contiguous words into a single segmental phonological unit.) If Sanskrit orthography does not mark cursus-medial word boundaries, it responds to segmental but not to suprasegmental conditions of speech. (French, on the other hand, ignores in its orthography both segmental and suprasegmental facts and separates lexical words by blank spaces, or at least, as in Venfant /lafa/, by apostrophes.) It is not unexpected that in a cursus consisting of several words and belonging to a language that has distinctive (emic) suprasegmental features, these features cannot be simply suppressed; their consistent omission would jeopardize or destroy the intelligibility of an utterance. That is the reason why in Sanskrit, which does have emic word accent (presumably of pitch), the cursus is not a single phonological word, while in French (with predictable wordfinal stress, except on /a/) and in Classidcal Latin (with predictable word stress on the penultimate or antepenultimate, depending on the quantity of the penultimate syllable) it is. To be sure, suprasegmental features, though they be distinctive, may be suppressed in the clitic portion of the nexus, and even changed in the lexemes of a nexus (for example, Greek TtaiSei; 'children' becomes before a clitic pronoun jiatSeq xiveq 'some children' — though it must be 18

Cf. Galton 1962, 274-275: "... in Sanskrit, the utterance is [phonologically] organized along two lines: the major unit (sentence or verse) and the minor unit (the syllable), while, significantly enough, the boundary line between the intermediate and to us so natural units, the words, is blurred. Sanskrit has, therefore, gone very far in abolishing word-delimitative features...." The "major unit" is what I call cursus, which is phonologically divisible, not into words, but into syllables. The "us", to whom the words are "so natural [phonological] units", are speakers of languages not operating with cursus, while users of cursus languages do not really speak in words, as it were — though of course they are aware of them as lexemes on the morphological and lexical level.

WORD, NEXUS, AND CURSUS AS MORPHONOLOGICAL UNITS

37

fivSpe? tive? 'some men', where xtviq must be used because av5pe /a-pa-le/ or /a-ple/; the loss of final s in tabulas /ta-bu-la:s/ > /ta-blas/ > /ta-bla/, now also /tab/ 5 — which had momentous morphological consequences in that it reduced the Old French two-case system in which -s frequently was * Malmberg 1935, 85. See also above, Chapter 3C, on the phonetic signaling of syllable boundaries. * Martinet 1952, 145 and 148: "L'emploi, en phonétique évolutive, du terme 'tendance' ne saurait prêter le flanc à la critique, à condition toutefois que le linguiste qui s'en sert ne dissimule ni à soi même ni à autrui tout ce que ce terme recouvre d'hypothèse et d'ignorance." "... postuler une tendance phonétique n'implique aucune explication causale, mais l'hypothèse qu'un certain nombre de processus doivent leur origine à un même faisceau de causes dont, un jour peut-être, nous arriverons à déterminer la nature." * Concerning the syllabic division of geminates see below, Chapter 5B. 5 On the closing of syllables in very recent French owing to the fall of /a/, and on the emergence of new dusters, see below, p. 69, and Pulgram 1961, 322-323. It should be noted that, phonetically at least, the syllable /tab/ is less forcefully closed if the /b/ is pronounced unreleased, without explosion, as it often is.

SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION 6 9

the signaling morpheme, to a one-case (that is, no-case) system; the conversion of a vowel followed by a nasal consonant into a nasalized vowel ( Ion-gam > /lo-ga/ or /lôg/) ; the monophthongization of diphthongues (ne-po-tem > /ne-vou(t)/ > /na-v0/) ; and the change from falling diphthongue ending in the semivowel, into a rising one ending in the vowel {re-gem > /rej/ > /rua/): all these did cause the opening of syllables at one stage or another of the language.6 Operating against the tendency toward open syllabicity was the reduction in the number of unstressed /e/'s (that developed into the current unstable, in many instances optionally pronounced, /s/'s) ever since the sixteenth century. But again a trend toward open syllabicity can be observed, this time favored by the rise of sentence sandhi, in French grammar called liaison, and due to French's becoming a CL-SS, which was accompanied by the loss of word stress in the utterance. Thus Latin méos infantes became Old French /mes â-fâts/ and Modern French /me-zâ-fâ/ [me-zâ-fl] mes enfants. But since in recent times the occurrence of sandhi has been diminishing, this particular trend against closed and toward open syllabicity may be running out also. Yet now once more a counter-development favoring the open syllable appears to be at work as various initial and final consonant groupings hitherto prohibited are becoming acceptable, so that sauve-nous /sov-nu/ now can be 'heard' as /so-vnu/ on the analogy of a postpausal venez /va-ne/ which can now be articulated as /vne/ without causing a raising of eyebrows; pince-nez /pês-ne/ as /pê-sne/ on the analogy of ce n'est pas as /sne-pa/; lâche-moi /las-mua/ as /la-smua/ on the analogy of chemin as /smè/; etc? In ancient Greek, a clear tendency toward open syllabicity has been observed by competent historians.8 And it can also be noticed throughout the history of Latin. To the older period belong devel9

Cf. Martinet 1952, 145 = 1955, 326. To which is added this remark, 1952, 147 = 1955, 327-328: "On ne peut donc dire que la syllabe ouverte ait jamais été une 'loi' du français à aucun stade de son évolution. Mais elle a été le but d'une 'tendance' qui a joué pendant des siècles sans jamais se réaliser intégralement." ' For details see Pulgram 1961, 1965 (Prosodie), and 1967 (Trends). 9 Lejeune 1955, 260-263.

7 0 SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION

opments like *abs-moueo > a-moueo, *is-dem > i-dem, *dis-mitto > di-mitto, *ad-spiro > a-spiro, *sexcenti /sek-skenti/ > sescenti

/se-skenti/; at least a simplification of the syllable-terminal cluster occurs in *farc-si (perfect of farcire)

> far-si, *fulc-si (perfect of

fulgere) > ful-si. The process continued in later Latin with the loss of the final consonants: iuuestod > iusto, longam > longa, manus

> manu (the last type not in all dialects of Latin) — with highly injurious consequences for the Latin inflexional system, which, except for the contrast between singular and plural, was to disappear almost completely in the Romance dialects (in some of which, notably modern standard French, even the number contrast is highly reduced though it maintains itself in orthography: table / t a b b / — tables / t a b b / , toit /tua/ — toits /tua/, rue /ry/ — rues

/ry/). Numerous consonant sequences, some already the result of earlier simplification, were further reduced, at least to the extent that two contiguous consonants were assimilated to one another, a process which in many cases produced geminates hence a less severe phonetic closure of the syllable. A strong tendency running against open syllabicity is brought about by extensive syncopation of unstressed vowels in late spoken Latin. But it should be noted that syncopation takes place only in phonotactic conditions where it does not produce non-permissible consonant groups or nonpermissible single syllable-final or syllable-initial consonants; in other words, it does not lead to a phonotactic restructuring of Latin at that time.9 But in the subsequent history from late spoken Latin to the Romance languages the tendency toward open syllabicity reasserts itself once more.10 The loss of final -s in many dialects of Modern Spanish can also be stated in terms of the tendency toward open syllabicity. Interesting are cases of syncope in Latin followed by metathesis in Spanish, as in titulu /ti-tu-lu/ > /tit-lu/ > /til-de/ tilde, spatula /spa-tu-la/ > /spat-la/ > /es-pal-da/ espalda. In Spanish both ti-tlo '

Cf. Anderson 1965. Complete histories of syllabic structure from Latin to Italian, and from Latin to Spanish, may be found in two University of Michigan doctoral dissertations: Kim 1965, and Valencia 1966, respectively. 10

SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION 7 1

and tit-lo, and ti-dlo, would be impossible; tid-lo might pass, even though in such cases the final /d/ is realized as a fricative [6] which again relaxes and softens the syllable closure.11 The same phonetic effect is produced by the final /l/ of til-de and espal-da, occupying its present place because of metathesis.12 Moreoever, in many dialects the group /l/ plus consonant in the same syllable becomes /u/ plus consonant, with further relaxing of the syllable closure. (In French the /u/ forming a diphthongue with the preceding vowel results in a monophthongue, thus completing the opening of the syllable: sal-tat > /sau-ta/ > /so-ta/ or, after loss of final /a/, /sot/ saute). A different manner of simplifying a consonantal group produced by syncope, or of bringing about an open syllable, is attested by uetulu /ue-tu-lu/ > /uet-lu/, where the openness of the first syllable was assured by replacing /t-1/ by /kl/, whence /ue-klu/, which becomes regularly Spanish viejo (rather than uetulu > uetlu > *ueltu > *vieldo, like titulu > tilde), Italian vecchio,

French vieil, etc. (No doubt the replacement of /uetlu/ by /ueklu/ was seconded by the greater frequency of the ending -c(u)lus in Latin as compared with -t(u)lus; thus analogy may also have played a role here.) Also Common Slavic seems to exhibit a tendency toward open syllabicity.13 All this evidence, and much more, strongly inclines one to discerning a universal trend. "Even languages which admit implosive ( = syllable-final)14 consonants and closed syllables as opposed to open ones, most often manifest traces of the primitive syllable tendency towards the type /PA/ [that is, CV]."15 Malmberg sees 11

Cf. Malmberg 1963 (Structural), 187. See also Valencia 1966. Note that the refusal to tolerate initial /sp/ is stronger than the tendency to open syllabicity, so that a closed syllable /es-/ is created merely to circumvent an s impura. " See Martinet 1955, 260-263. 14 Some linguists, in particular Malmberg, call all syllable-final consonants implosive. This does not clearly reveal the phonetic facts because such consonants may also be fully exploded phonetically (in languages where implosive and explosive articulations are not distinguished phonemically from one another). I prefer to employ the terms implosive and explosive with their phonetic meaning. (Footnote added.) 16 Malmberg 1963 (Structural), 131. 12

7 2 SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION

in this a phonetic-articulatory manifestation of the principle of least effort, 16 which has some connection with the informationbearing power of linguistic segments.17 In particular, it has repeatedly been suggested that the final phonemic portions of a morpheme carry less information than do its initial ones, and that they are therefore more subject to synchronic slurring and to diachronic change, especially loss.18 (This may also occur even when the final phonemes of a word carry morphological information, provided that their function is taken over by another feature of the utterance: here belongs the loss of Latin flexional morphemes, the loss of the Old French final -s, the disappearance of both of which was compensated for by syntactic means, namely, the use of prepositions and a hardening of the rules on word order.) "Such 'weakness' of finals is widely attested in Indo-European languages outside Sanskrit, and it is probably to be attributed, in terms of information theory, to the high redundancy and low information-content of the end-portions of words and morphemes. Speech occurs in time, and as each element is uttered the next becomes correspondingly more predictable, i.e., redundant. This, as everyone knows from experience, applies to some extent to the words in a sentence; but it is also relevant to the phonemes within words and morphemes .... The initial position, on the other hand, is the least redundant, so that at the junction of words or morphemes there is

"

This principle was formulated by Zipf 1949. See Malmberg 1963 (Structural), 144. 18 The corollary relative phonetic strength of the word-initial position has been denied by various linguists; cf. Hall 1964, 551 (with fns. 3 and 4): "Some observers have considered that word-initial position is in itself somehow enough to preserve a consonant from change. This theory has been rejected by those who do not accept 'mystical' explanations of language development." It is not claimed — at least by me — that initial consonants are "preserved" from change; it is merely observed that they are relatively less likely to change, and, if they do, that they change less radically, than word-final ones, as the history of almost any dialect confirms. And if a case can be made for certain generic traits that distinguish final from initial consonants, the explanation for their divergent historical development has nothing "mystical" about it; if it had, it would of course have to be rejected, as Hall rightly argues. 17

SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION 7 3

an informational 'caesura' representing the transition from highest to lowest redundancy ,..". 19 It is interesting to note in this context that the absence of word boundaries in CL, as contrasted with NL and WL, probably has something to do with what is popularly referred to as their 'precise' or 'clear' pronunciation, though it is not the only cause thereof. This is so because in the cursus word-final elements, which otherwise might be slurred, appear very frequently in non-final position; in a cursus only syllable ends (and word-ends just coincidentally) can in any sense be called final ; and since syllables, being figurae, are not per se information-bearing, it cannot be said that their ends carry relatively less information than do their beginnings; hence their ends are not redundant as are the ends of morphemes and other information-bearing units, and therefore not subject to slurring. Since furthermore syllabation of the cursus, ignoring word boundaries, produces a great many more open syllables than observance of word boundaries in syllabation would allow, syllable ends are also by their phonetic shape, mostly vocalic, less prone to the kind of deformation that besets less sonorous phones. All this is aptly illustrated by French, which is characterized by a 'precise' staccato pronunciation of strings of syllables, all of them equally 'clear' and complete, all of them equally stressed (that is, unmarked by stress differences except for a non-distinctive stress on the last syllable of the cursus and an occasional expressive accent d'insistance on some cursus-medial syllable), with distinct vocalic qualities (while English tends to reduce many unstressed syllables to /a/), and with many word-final consonants appearing, thanks to liaison, in syllable-initial position: il est allé chez une infirmière 'he went 19

Allen 1962, 17-18. See also Malmberg 1962 (La notion), and Malmberg 1963 (Gémination). What is said here about phonemes applies equally to graphemes, both in writing and in deciphering them: the closer the grapheme stands to the end of the unit, the more expendable it is, the more illegibly it may be written without impeding the reader, whose need to discern the graphemes accurately decreases toward the end of a unit. That is to say, the receiver is not equally intent upon the beginning and upon the end of units; he neither hears nor reads in segments but in Gestalten, as it were. Not insignificantly, abbreviations in writing more often cancel the end than the beginning of whatever they stand for.

7 4 SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION

to a nurse' is /i-lE-ta-le-Se-zy-ns-fir-mjer/ ; a transcription marking word boundaries — with the normally silent word-final consonants, which are pronounced only if they serve liaison, in parentheses — would be entirely senseless: /i(l) e(t) ale se(z) yn efirmjer/.20 In English, on the other hand, where word boundaries, or at least nexus boundaries, are frequently marked by various signals, and where numerous syllable-ends coincide with word-ends and therefore cannot but be consonantal since so many words end in consonants, there exist numerous final positions that are prone to slurring and weakening. (Hence it seems to Frenchmen that speakers of English speak 'carelessly' and 'swallow' the final portion of the words they pronounce — an impression further enhanced by the numerous /a/'s in unstressed position — whereas it seems to the speakers of English that Frenchman expend an inordinate amount of muscular and articulatory energy on their speech, as if they were congenitally more vehement and less 'unflappable' than they ought to be.) This word-final weakening is clearly audible if one compares word-initial and word-final allophones (and the latter need not be unreleased for the difference to show up) of the same phonemes in words like peep, pup, coke, cook, gag, judge, fife, sauce, noon, nun, lull, roar.21 Into the same order of phenomena one must also place the tendency to reduce English triple and quadruple final clusters : facts /faekts/ > /fseks/, gifts /gifts/ > /glfs/, asked /aeskt/ > /aest/, attempts /atempts/ > /atemps/ > /stems/, excerpts /sks-sapts/ > /ek-sarps/, didn't /dldnt/ > /dint/, fifth /flfG/ > /flG/, etc. Malmberg found that in Spanish this peculiarity of word-final consonants (Spanish is a NL) can be observed also in syllable-final consonants — a fact which further supports phonetically the view of the phonological equivalence of syllable-final with section-final conditions; and he is willing to make of it a general linguistic principle: "La place après le support syllabique [the nucleus] est plus 'faible' qu'ailleurs. Il est donc normal que la distinction régulière et consciente des différences phoniques y soit réalisée plus i0 81

See also below, p. 90. Cf. Kurath 1964, 51.

SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION 7 5

difficilement qu'à l'initiale de la syllabe où la force articulatoire est concentrée. Les ressources distinctives du système consonantique se montrent par conséquent bien réduites en fin de syllabe déjà dans l'espagnol de la bonne société de Madrid. Et l'évolution des dialectes et des parlers vulgaires vient d'accentuer encore cette tendance de la langue ..." "... il me semble que cette diminution constante de l'intensité articulatoire vers la fin de la syllabe est un caractéristique constitutif de celle-ci, à l'aide de laquelle bon nombre de faits de l'évolution phonique trouvent une explication facile [N.B.] .... Cet affaiblissement de la partie finale est propre à chaque syllabe indépendamment de la langue. Mais la tendance peut être plus ou moins prononcée et avoir des conséquences très différentes selon le système de la langue en cause."22 For all these reasons, then, the Principle of maximal open syllabicity appears to be sustained by both descriptive (phonemic and phonetic) and historical circumstantial evidence. The Principle of minimal coda and maximal onset, applied in cases where more than one phonotactically admissible syllabation is possible, follows from the preceding argument. For it may be maintained that, if a syllable cannot be open, let it be minimally closed, that is, let it be closed by as light a coda cluster as possible — which is itself merely another manifestation of the trend toward open syllabicity. B. SYLLABLE-FINAL VOWELS

What was said in Rule 3 about English /I/ applies also to English /e, œ, o, A, U/ as in pet, pat, pot, putt, put, respectively, all of which are excluded from word-final position and are therefore sometimes called checked vowels.23 Consequently, petting, patting, potting, 22

Malmberg 1948 (La structure), 105, 108, and Malmberg 1948 (Note). Some analyses of English treat the other vowels as diphthongs: /ei, ou/, or ley, ow/, etc. If this is so, however, then every syllable in English is in fact closed, as Teeter 1966, 476-477 quite rightly pointed out. I agree with Teeter that the more convenient way of contrasting the vowels of beat and bit, and of the other pairs, is by applying the tense — lax distinction. Certainly no speaker 83

7 6 SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION

putting, and putting must be syllabized (like filling /fi-llrj/ [ffHlrj] discussed in Rule 3, above) as /pVt-Ig/ [pV^-JIg].24 The closedness of the syllable containing the checked vowel is indicated with greater phonetic accuracy than one normally expects from English orthography by the double spelling of the consonant, as mentioned earlier; this in turn may induce literate speakers to use a reading pronunciation that emphasizes the sub-phonemic gemination (exactly as some Frenchmen cherish the sub-phonemic distinction amer /amer/ [amer] — grammaire /gramsr/ [gram:er]). Indeed niking, stoping, ruting (for nicking, stopping, rutting) would surely be read [naiklq], [stouplq], [rutlq].25 Yet orthography is by no means consistent: cook — cooking not coocking, wool — woolen not woollen (but woolly), come — coming not comming; conversely, the word-medial geminate graphemes are sometimes transferred also to word-final position: putting — putt, pulling — pull, puffing — Puff> lacking — lack, where put, pul, puf, lak would be equally adequate spellings. And Britain, Britannic are often misspelled Brittain, Brittannic because after /I/ one hears a phonetic geminate. (But Brittany is standard orthography.)26 The coincidence of morpheme boundary and syllable boundary, as in /pVt---Iq/, is fortuitous; the syllable boundary occupies its of English will ever agree that he hears a closed syllable in fe-ver, so-da, etc. And even if one discovers a phonetic olf-glide ([fij-va-, sou-da]) the syllable is thereby not closed in the same sense as it is in feet /flit/ [fijt] (I prefer /fit/ [fi:t]), wrote /rout/ [ro«t] (I prefer /rot/ [ro:t]). 21 See Chapter 5C, below, on geminates and their syllabation. On [1-1] and [{-{] see also p. 48, above. 26 For the influence of orthography upon the pronunciation of Italian syntactic doubling see Chapter 5C, below. 26 Dialects of English in which Mary, merry, marry are phonemically equivalent and have all the vowel /e/, hence are transcribed /mer-I/, are also phonetically and syllabically homophonous [mer-ri]. Yet a speaker may well choose to pronounce the second and the third, to differentiate it from the first, with a -—.

phonetically lengthened continuant [r], especially if it is trilled, and say [mer-r:!]. In dialects where Mary has /e/, in contrast with the /e/ of the other two words, there is also a contrast in syllabation: /me-rl/ [m6:-rl] versus /m£r-I/ [mer-rl]. And where there is a triple contrast /me-rl/ — /mer-I/ — /mser-I/, the corresponding syllabations are [me:-rl] — [msr-ri] — [msr-rl].

SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION 77

place for phonotactic and not for morphological reasons. Kurath found quite rightly that "the listener must have other information [than the syllabic boundary] to tell that thick—er, wool--en, etc. consist of two morphemes, and dicker, sullen, etc. only of one." 27 In English, then, the distribution of vowels influences syllabation: some, like /e, i, u/ may occur both syllable-medially and syllablefinally; others, like /ae, I, U/, never occur syllable-finally. But if all English vowels could be arranged into a number of pairs in such a way that one member of each pair occurs only in free and the other only in checked position, then English could be analyzed as having half as many vowel phonemes as we now count. In French, such a merger of phonemes is actually under way, though it is not completed in the careful standard language of all speakers. There is in progress a rephonologization of the six vowels /e, e, 0, ce, o, a/ (that is, of all except the highest and the lowest — /i, y, u, a/, the merger of /a/ and /a/ being long since accomplished — and of /a/) in such a way that they are grouped into three pairs of phonetically neighboring open and close types, with the open ones [e, ce, 0] regularly occurring in non-final, and the close ones [e, 0, o] in final position. This creates no phonological difficulties in modern French, although fastidious speakers — provided they actually become aware of the merger — raise social and orthoepic objections, especially when the vowels concerned are in stressed position (but in a cursus relatively few are). But if the trend persists (and chances are that it will) French may end up with three vowel phonemes in the mid-position, each with an open and a close allophone in complementary distribution with respect to the syllable — a stage in which Spanish finds itself already, and which Italian is approaching. 28 This of course raises the question whether in such instances the syllable has not become 'phonemic', and whether we should not posit a 'syllabeme', which is no doubt what some scholars had in

" Kurath 1964, 153. (Kurath does not, by the way, use rules of syllabation like the ones I have described.) " For details on the French merger see Pulgram 1967 (Trends), Section 2.

7 8 SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION

mind when they spoke of 'phonemic syllables'.29 I do not think this would be convenient because syllable-finally is also sectionfinally in terms of phonotactics, and therefore once it is established that only close vowels occur section-finally and only open ones section-medially, the occurrence of one or the other allophone implies the locus of the syllable boundary, whose terminal behaves phonetically like that of a section boundary (and in this case obligatorily, not just optionally). It is therefore not the syllable boundary itself which signals a meaningful distinction, nor of course the allophone, but the occurrence of an allophone that is regularly, being either of the section-final or the section-medial variety, either followed or not followed by a phoneme of pause: since French cursus-final peur /pGEr/ is [poer] and cursus-final peu /p(E/ is [po] (I am using the transcription in capitals to indicate the result of a phonemic merger), [oe] is always syllable-medial and [0] syllable-final, even if the second occurs in cursus-medial peur in a phrase like peur et crainte /p(E-re-kret/ [po-re-kret].30 In other words, phonological primacy belongs to the phonotactics of the language; positional allophones and syllable boundaries are derived from it. Yet there being no 'syllabeme', no 'phonemic (distinctive) syllable', and no phonemic syllable boundary, does not alter the fact that a syllable is a phonological unit of language with phonologically (as opposed to grammatically) determined boundaries.

C. CONSONANT CLUSTER, CONSONANT SEQUENCE

The interlude between the vocalic nuclei of two neighboring syllables within a section may consist of one consonant or several consonants. If one, it is either the coda of the first or the onset of "

See above, Chapter 1, fn. 22. I do not mean to suggest that the pronunciation just cited is on everyone's lips; the whole matter is in flux, but the direction, the trend, seems to be set. For example, peureux /pCE-rCE/ may be [p0-r0] phonotactically, but also [pcer-0] in analogy of peur /peer/ [poer] from which it is derived. For details see Pulgram 1967 (Trends), Section 2.

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79

the second syllable; if several, they either form all of them the coda of the first or the onset of the second syllable, or they are divided among the two syllables. These five possible cases may be illustrated as follows. (1) parent /per-ant/. (2) shady /se-dl/. (3) ...VC„-V (Cn means two or more consonants). This case can arise only in a language that does not tolerate ...VC(n.1)-CV ... where syllable-initial C is any consonant of the language, of which no example comes to my mind. Otherwise this distribution of consonants is covered, in accordance with the Principle of maximal open syllabicity, or the Principle of maximal onset and minimal coda, under (4) and (5), below. (4) proclaim /pro-klem/, rooster /ru-sta-/, prescribe /prt-skrajb/ (5) garland /gar-land/, portray /par-tre/, empty /emp-ti/, textbook /tekst-bUk/. The term 'cluster' has been generally used in the sense of interlude regardless of syllabic assignment of the consonants. But in both synchronic and diachronic linguistics it makes a great deal of difference whether a series of consonants occurs as coda or as onset, or is divided among coda and onset. It is therefore strange that the term cluster which has, as heretofore used, a purely orthographic basis, should have enjoyed phonological status in descriptive and historical grammar.31 I proposed therefore that a series of consonants belonging to the same syllable be called a CLUSTER, and one that is divided among adjoining syllables, a SEQUENCE. 32 Prepausal (section-final) and postpausal (section81

This was implicitly criticized by Carroll 1958, 274, who objected to the indiscriminate use of the term 'cluster' for statistical purposes in Saporta 1955, and suggested that "the data should be restricted to clusters within syllable boundaries." 82 Pulgram 1965 (Consonant). I am quite aware that some scholars (e.g., Vogt 1954) have divided 'clusters' into 'sequences'. But since they used neither term in the way I do, or with a strictly technical meaning, I shall retain my terminology, all the more so since 'cluster' seems better to connote the coherence of the phonemes within one syllable, while 'sequence' refers merely to their occurring in succession. As a neutral term, indicating a row of consonants without regard to syllabation, I use 'series' or 'group'.

8 0 SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION

initial) groups of consonants are therefore always clusters and not sequences. That the distinction is not only terminologically convenient but also linguistically useful, indeed indispensable, will emerge from the discussion in Chapter 5A.33 D. THE IRREGULAR CODA

Rule of syllabation 5 requires that whenever an interlude that is a sequence cannot be divided in such a way as to result in a permissible coda and a permissible onset, the burden of irregularity must be borne by the coda rather than the onset. This heuristic Principle of the irregular coda can, like that of open syllabicity, be sustained by phonetic and phonemic considerations.34 Section A of the present Chapter 4, dealing with open syllabicity, has brought together evidence on the intrinsic phonetic weakness of syllable-final consonants as compared with syllable-initial ones, of the coda as compared with the onset. It has also been said (see above, p. 72) that due to the redundancy inherent in any utterance, the amount of information carried decreases toward the end of the utterance as compared with the beginning of it; that is to say, the closer one comes to the end of any unit within an utterance, or of the whole utterance, the better are the chances of guessing correctly ttye as yet unsaid remainder. While it is true that syllables per se do not bear information (they are figurae, not signs), their phonological configuration at the boundaries corresponds to that of phonological units which do, namely, that of the sections (words, nexus, cursus). The argument is, then, that since unit-initial consonants carry more information than unit-final ones, the latter are not only more prone to diminution and disappearance (see the tendency toward open syllabicity just discussed), but also, by the same token, and since they are less subject to the attention of the speaker and the listener, more prone to deviation from normal " The matter is discussed at length in Kim 1965, and Valencia 1966. See also below, Chapter 4D. " In the subsequent argument I follow, or elaborate upon, Valencia 1965. See also Valencia 1966.

SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION 81

behavior as regards phoneme distribution. They are in a position of greater articulatory and perceptual inertia than unit-initial consonants. And this explains, I believe, "why prepausal nonpermissible clusters [of consonants] can find acceptance by the speakers of a given language: sounds in prepausal position can be slurred or pronounced in a more careless way, and eventually modified or dropped. However, non-permissible postpausal clusters, which seem to require a more clear (and rapid35) pronunciation, are rejected or modified."36 Prepausal and postpausal phonotactics being phonological equivalents of syllable-final and syllable-initial, the same statement concerning higher demands for 'regularity' can be made with respect to the onset as compared with the coda. But it will be recalled that the application of the Rules of syllabation leads but rarely to irregular codas, generally in not fully naturalized loans.37 It is also a well-known fact of historical linguistics that on the whole word-initial (typically postpausal) clusters are more durable and less subject to modification, especially simplification and loss, than are word-final (typically prepausal) ones, regardless of suprasegmental features. And again the same observation can be made with respect to syllable onsets and codas: the former show on the whole fewer and less drastic changes.38 " Valencia 1965, 5, derives this notion from Twaddell 1953,423: "The feature of rapid crescendo is so characteristic of post-pause allophones that in reverse speech the mirror-image of initial sounds is usually not perceived. Such rapid decrescendo and such brevity simply do not occur finally." (Footnote added.) *• Valencia 1965, 6. The following illustrations from modern Spanish are cited (5): "... such words as sport, snob, and other borrowings with impure s invariably call for a prosthetic e. But words like Hans, clubs, and commercial products such as Tilt, corn flakes (with non-permissible [final] -ns, -bs, -It, -rn, -ks) are often accepted in their original form, even if sometimes they are given an alternate Hispanic form: [has, klubes, til, kor fleis]. Speakers of the upper classes, radio announcers, and social climbers strive to achieve the 'proper* pronunciation of foreign words, and they often succeed when the non-permissible cluster is prepausal, but not when it is postpausal. Even the orthography reflects the fact. English sport, like snob (with non-permissible prepausal and postpausal clusters for the Spanish speaker) are often spelled esport and esnob (a well-accepted word, base form of esnobismo and other derivatives [but they are not spelled esporte, esnobe]." " For fuller details see below, Chapter 5B. •* See Kim 1965, and Valencia 1966, for an examination of the relation of

8 2 SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION

It is affirmed, therefore, that the heuristic procedure stated in Rule 5 is supported by phonological facts. E. DIVISION OF INTERLUDES ON STATISTICAL CRITERIA

In cases where several phonotactically permissible syllabations of an interlude seem feasible (roo-ster, roos-ter, roost-er), I choose the solution that results in the open syllable, or, if that is impossible, the one that results in the smallest coda and the largest onset (not listing, because of /I/, not list-ing, but lis-ting). O'Connor and Trim, on the other hand, proposed a choice based on statistical criteria. They devised a table for Received Southern British English in which they list the types of phoneme groups, and then give the number of occurrences of these groups in word-initial and wordfinal position in a finite, but sufficiently extensive, corpus, thus: Type CV VC CC W V

Initial 421 209 26 10

Final 276 277 59 22 12

Then they argue this way: "Thus, if a sequence [in my terminology, a series, without reference to the syllabic assignment of the consonants] VCV may be analyzed into VC-V or V-CV, the relative probabilities of division would be of the order 277 + 12 = 289 to 12 + 421 = 433."39 They then adopt the solution having the greater index, namely, V-CV, with 433, rather than VC-V, with 289. Hence moral is to be syllabized mo-ral rather than mor-al, though both are, in the O'Connor-Trim scheme, phonotactically permissible. word terminals and syllable terminals in the history from Latin to Italian and Spanish, respectively, uncovering far-reaching parallelism in the evolution of the terminals of the two units. *• O'Connor-Trim 1953, 121. This method was applied to French by Arnold 1955/56, 280-281, and to Czech by Kucera 1961, 81-83.

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It would be a massive chore to construct such tables for all languages that one wished to syllabize, and even the English table would have to be enlarged to accommodate a word like extra /ekstra/ with a four-consonant group (which according to my Rules has to be divided /k-str/). Czech, for example, a language rich in consonant groups, requires five pages of syllabation rules of the statistical kind.40 The phonotactic rules of the kind I propose not only take less space, but are also identical — it is hoped — for all languages. But I must raise an objection on grounds more substantive than just economy, or elegance, of statement. In fact, I should not divide mo-ral, as O'Connor-Trim do, but mor-al, because English /o/ cannot occur syllable-finally since it does not occur sectionfinally (or word-finally). In other words, O'Connor-Trim, in considering the distribution of consonants only, overlook the fact that vowels also obey phonotactic strictures — which is exactly the error I committed in my earlier attempts at syllabation.41 I believe furthermore that concern with only the number of consonants involved, and disregard of their nature, leads to distortions which the non-statistical approach avoids. For example, both /tr/ and /f0/ occur word-initially in English, as in tree and phthisis; and since both are CC, they have statistically the same quotient of occurrence syllable-initially. Yet I should, though the division be-tray is clearly admissible, balk somewhat at the division o-phthalmology (quite apart from the fact that the initial /a/ cannot terminate a syllable). The only model of /f0/ is phthisis with its few congeners — and even all these words are more often than not pronounced with a simple /6/ or /1/ rather than with the cluster.42 I should, therefore, even on statistical evidence, be more inclined to syllabize oph-thalmology, and relegate the initial /f0/, which does indeed exist in some pronunciations of English (no one says that /fGisIs/ is un-English), among the para-clusters — a term which shall be discussed and defined in Chapter 5B. In anticipation of 40 41

"

Kuiera 1961, 81-86. See above, Chapter 3, fn. 14. See below, Chapter 5B, in particular fn. 15.

8 4 SPECIFICATION AND ELABORATION OF THE RULES OF SYLLABATION

that argument, however, it may be noted here that one is face to face with an irregular onset, as it were, comparable to the irregular coda spoken of earlier; the essential difference will be that irregular clusters appearing in the onset rather than in the coda will not be explicable by reference to information theory and redundancy in unit-final position, though fundamentally an aura of unnaturalized forreignness will cling to them, as it does to the irregular coda (whether the latter is a single consonant or a cluster).

5

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A. WORD-LANGUAGE, NEXUS-LANGUAGE, CURSUS-LANGUAGE

At the end of Chapter 2 it was suggested that the distinction between WL, NL, and CL is of typological magnitude. (Naturally, the judgment as to when a difference between two systems is of typological magnitude, is not always, certainly not in the present instance, based on quantified or quantifiable criteria. But this is so in most efforts at taxonomy, especially in linguistics: whether one affirms that a dialect boundary runs somewhere across a linguistic map depends on whether the number and kinds of isoglosses more or less bundled together are or are not judged important enough by the observer — and not all observers will always agree — to merit the title dialect boundary; at what point in time in a diachronic view system A should assume the name B depends on how many features of A the linguist requires to be maintained so as to maintain the name A for the whole system, or how many must change before he calls it B — for certainly never do all features change at the same time: if they did, communication would cease from one day to the next, or at least from one generation to the next, which simply does not happen. Being aware of these and other pitfalls of taxonomy, I still think it not useless or inconvenient to organize even behavioral events and items into classes, or, if you will, types.) Most languages, one is inclined to believe, are NL; I know of no pure WL; and there seem to be relatively few CL (of either the CL-S or the CL-SS kind). Such a classification of languages is especially useful in matters of syllabation; indeed it is indispensable since word, nexus, and cursus are the units to be extrapolated from a piece of discourse

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before syllabic division may be undertaken, for they constitute the sections, which are the proper loci of syllabation. It was suggested once that the following two sentences are phonologically identical, except for the extra phoneme at the end of the second: the good candy came anyway, and the good can decay many ways.1 The idea was energetically rebuffed: "In the light of the progress that has been achieved in the last two decades in American phonology, this appears as a ridiculous instance of the baby-out-with-the-bath syndrome."2 Now the two sentences could in fact sound homophonous if anyone chose to articulate each as a single nexus, each with one stress (presumably on the first vowel of (m)any), with complete obliteration of word boundaries, and syllabized something like /5a-gUd-kaen-di-ke-m£en-I-ue(z)/. But this will scarcely be recognized as an English utterance because English does not make nexus of such length and does not normally deprive so many words in an utterance of distinctive stress. A phonological formation of this kind is rather like a cursus — but English is not a CL.3 If, however, the language involved is a CL, in particular if it is, like French, a CL-SS, in which words lose both their segmental and their suprasegmental identity within the cursus, then two cursus which are blatantly distinct lexemically and semantically, may indeed be phonologically identical and have the same syllabation. For example, consider the following two French lines: Galle, amant de la reine, alia, tour magnanime, Galamment de Varene a la Tour Magne a Nimes. 1

Chomsky-Miller 1963, 280; see also Miller 1958, 398. Hockett 1965, 202 fn. 398. ' Some years ago, a popular song which meant to be humorous, or at least phonetically playful, used cursus in English; as a result the text was impossible or difficult to understand. I shall cite it, and then transcribe it in cursus, as it were (with a syllabic I]/ in the third, and syllabic />?/ in the last line). /||mér-zi-dots||/ Mares eat oats And does eat oats /||sen-dô-zi-dots|I/ And little lambs eat ivy; /llœn-H-l-laem-zi-dâi-vIH/ A kid'll eat ivy, too; /||s-kid-li-dâi-vl-tu||/ Wouldn't you? /lluu-a-tiü||/ 8

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'Galle, the lover of the queen, marched — a noble feat — Gallantly from the arena to the Tour Magne at Nîmes.' If one reads each line as a cursus (a 'breath group'), both lines sound, and must be syllabized, thus: /llga-la-ma-da-la-re-na-a-la-tur-ma-jia-ni-mall/ or, with the omission of additional /a/'s optional in prose, /||ga-la-mâd-Ia-rs-na-la-tur-ma-jia-nim||/. To be sure, this is not the most elegant or even the most obvious reading, especially of the first line; but neither is it un-French. Moreover, if the two lines are spoken, not as unconnected utterances, but as two halves of a single meaningful statement, they differ in intonation contours: the first ends on a non-final (rising) pitch, the second on a final (falling) one. But still, the two lines can be phonologically equivalent under some circumstances, while the two English sentences cited above cannot under any circumstances. Also because of cursus formation, and because French does not distinguish short from long vowels phonemically, the sentence Papa a à aller à Arles 'Papa has to go to Aries', must be phonologically transcribed and syllabized /||pa-pa-le-arl||/. To make this intelligible, the speaker must quadruple the phonetic duration of the second /a/ so as to indicate the presence of four lexical a's, as it were, and he may well also choose to give his voice a wavering pitch, then do the same by doubling the third /a/. Whereupon the whole thing will sound, though not un-French, odd and ungainly. No matter how grammatically and phonetically acceptable it may be, even a moderately fastidious speaker will simply avoid this sentence (which is very easily done by his saying Papa doit aller à Arles — though à Arles has to remain). Even if French were a NL like English, the phrase quite properly transcribed, in six separate words, as /papá á á alé á árl/, would still sound quite unattractive — as does, for that matter, Row, oh oarsman, to yon low odious shores /ró ó órzmaen tajón ló odias sorz/. The Italian dialect of Rome is, like Standard Italian, a NL. In the dialect, standard svolto /zvól-to/ 'turned' is svorto; qualche

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/kual-ke/ 'some' is quarche; calmo /kal-mo/ 'calm' is carmo. If this word-medial substitution of /r/ for /I/ appears also at the junction of lexemes, one will easily conclude that they form a single phonological word, or a nexus. For example, standard il gatto /il-gatto/ 4 'the cat' — Roman er gatto-, col nome /kol-no-me/ 'with the name' — cor nome-, del mondo /del-mon-do/ 'of the world' — der monno. But intervocalic word-medial /l/ of Standard Italian is /I/ in Roman also: ala /a-la/ 'wing' — ala; mela /me-la/ 'apple' — mela. If, however, this intervocalic position comes to coincide with the junction of two lexemes forming a nexus, Standard Italian geminates (lengthens) the /l/ but Roman does not: a la 'to the' -+• alia /al-la/ — a la /a-la/ (homophonous with ala 'wing'); de 1(a) oca 'of the goose' -> dell'oca /del-lo-ka/ — de Voca\ con la pipa 'with the pipe' -> colla pipa /kol-la-pi-pa/ — co la pipa. Evidently wordmedial position is, as one would expect, equivalent phonotactically to the position at the juncture of two lexemes forming a nexus. If one considers word and nexus as phonological words, that is, in terms of syllabation, as sections, the statement becomes tautological, namely: section-medial is equivalent to section-medial.5 Hence the rule on the relationship between standard /l/ and Roman /r/ is most economically phrased by saying that Roman neutralizes the contrast between /l/ and /r/ in favor of /r/ in sectionmedial syllable-final position. Stating the same rule by referring, as is usually done, to a complex interplay of noun, article, gender, and various other non-phonological criteria is therefore unnecessarily cumbersome, indeed — if economy of statement and order of rules is a necessary part of linguistic analysis — incorrect; the rules of syllabation suffice. The Italian phenomenon called syntactic doubling, which refers to the doubling of lexeme-initial consonants that follow certain lexemes, is also predicated upon the occurrence of a nexus: the lexeme whose initial consonant is geminated must be preceded by 4

I choose the geminate transcription for phonologically long consonants because it is more convenient for syllabation; see below, Chapter 5B. 5 The characteristic diachronic evolution of sounds in this section-medial syllable-final position was pointed out and effectively used — without reference to syllabation — by Weinrich 1958, Chapter III: Variation.

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a clitic.6 Since it happens more rarely in the speech of northern than of central and southern Italians, one cannot but conclude that, although all Italian speeches are NL, the latter are more inclined toward nexus formation than are the former. The usage is, however, clearly stylistic rather than dialectal within each dialect, showing once more that in a given NL the formation of the nexus is basically optional. The connection between syllabation and typological differences among languages is alluded to in the following observation: "II faut donc déterminer les limites syllabiques des différentes langues. Et il faut montrer si, dans la chaîne parlée, la fin de mot se maintient en tant que fin de syllable ou si le groupe rythmique se comporte comme le mot. Le premier cas est celui du norvégien, de l'irlandais, du gallois, par exemple, le second celui du breton et du français." 7 Here fin de mot refers to the lexeme, groupe rythmique is mainly what I call cursus, though it includes, if vaguely, the notion of nexus. Accordingly, Norwegian, Irish, and Welsh may be regarded as NL, though Sommerfelt's typology would also allow them to be WL, since he does not distinguish sharply between word and nexus; Breton and French are manifestly CL. Yet in another context Sommerfelt does apparently discern, again in connection with syllabation, the difference between word and nexus as distinct from cursus: "In some languages the autonomy of the word is greater than in others, and different divisions in the sound chain can have phonological importance."8 A not inconsiderable practical consequence of these matters has to do with transcribing of discourse. Clearly the phonemic transcription of an utterance, even one which for some reason renders only segmental phonemes, must visibly indicate the limits, not of morphological or higher units, but of phonological units. If this is done merely by inserting blank spaces in the string of phoneme * No general rule on this doubling has so far been devised; the occasions where doubling takes place are always stated by means of a list rather than a rule. The problem will be discussed in greater detail below, Chapter 5C. A form of syntactic doubling will also be suggested for Finnish : see below, Chapter 5B. ' Sommerfelt 1962, 151 (originally written in 1924). « Sommerfelt 1936, 31.

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transcriptions, the blank spaces appear in WL between words, in NL between either words or nexus, and in CL between cursus; in other words, blank spaces separate sections, and no other units. (My use of blank spaces, single vertical lines, and double vertical lines, is meant to point up the difference between the three kinds of sections, which in purely phonological terms is irrelevant.) Consequently, the phrase please eat, if pronounced as two words, each with a main stress, is /pliz it/, but if pronounced as a nexus with a single stress it is /plizit/, syllabized /pli-zit/. And transcribing the French phrase comment allez-vous, which can hardly be anything but a single cursus, as /komat ale vu/ is patently senseless and must be replaced by /komatalevu/, or /ko-mS-ta-le-vu/. The very presence of the liaison between comment and allez indicates the absence of a boundary, and to put one into a phonemic transscription is absurd. Such erroneous transcriptions of French, though one finds them, are not common. But nexus in NL are frequently ignored in transcription. English he drinks is either /hi drlqks/ or /hidrlrjks/, depending, naturally, on what one has heard or intends (only main stress is transcribed); but /hi driqks/ is phonemically absurd. In a phonological transcription, then, graphic marking of unit boundaries other than the section — those of lexemes, morphemes, immediate constituents, phrases of one kind or another that are not sections — is illicit. It may be useful to mark such boundaries, of course; but they will not be, even if they show up in a phonological transcription, of a phonological order. And syllabic division pertains, as already noted, to the section, whatever other non-phonological units a section may comprise or coincide with. B. PERMISSIBLE AND NON-PERMISSIBLE CLUSTERS AND SEQUENCES

By and large, 'permissible' and 'non-permissible' corresponds to 'occurring' and 'non-occurring' in a given language (under an implied presumption of well-formedness). One may choose to employ the first pair of terms in the process of discovering syllable

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boundaries (when one seeks to determine how to divide an interlude), the second in the description of them (when one merely states the facts encountered in the corpus). But no matter which of these pairs is used, there inevitably arise doubtful and marginal cases where one hesitates to declare categorically that a certain consonant series is or is not a genuine, native, contemporary, structurally impeccable part of the idiom under examination. This is so because any living linguistic structure contains at its edges both the remnants of an archaic, disappearing system, and the harbingers of an innovating, arising system — and the difficulty lies in deciding where that murky region of the edges begins. In strictly synchronic terms, the linguist has two choices on which to base this decision. Either he considers everything that he finds in the corpus as 'occurring' in the sense that it must be included and accommodated in the system, hence is also permissible; or he harshly excludes whatever event does not fit a unique and homogeneous structural core, and denies it genuineness, relegating it thereby to the non-permissible class. It seems that an unconciliatory and doctrinaire stand on either side in the name of 'science' is disingenuous because a highly subjective decision on the part of the investigator is ineluctable; worse still, such a stand is inconvenient and unfruitful. Rigid pursuance of the first alternative leads to a complex and untidy statement that indiscriminately embraces borrowed, obsolete, and novel items, implicitly of low statistical value yet assigned the same systemic value, to whose inclusion one sacrifices an achievable degree of descriptive simplicity and neatness; the second alternative tempts the scholar to seek and impose simplicity and neatness with such vehemence that he is beguiled into performing what I should call Procrustean surgery, lopping and stretching the corpus so as to force it into a frame of scientific stringency and rigidity of the kind one associates with the natural, exact, 'hard' sciences, but which in the social and behavioral sciences, including linguistics, need not be demanded nor can always be attained without wilful mutilation of the evidence.9 •

I agree with Winter 1965, 488: "If we want our grammar not just to be a

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A third alternative is needed, one which permits the linguist to operate not only with a strictly circumscribed core structure, but also with coexistent systems or subsystems that are as much a requisite and characteristic part of the language as is the core itself, that are indeed of primary importance in an intelligent view of diachronic change. If linguists, in discussing an especially recalcitrant problem of phonemic analysis, in the end suggest two alternative solutions but lament that "the language is not very neat at this point, and ... both solutions are about equally vulnerable",10 one can only retort that there are numerous points in any language where neatness and uniqueness of solution are lacking (at least before the Procrustean linguist sets to work), and that a plurality of solutions seems 'vulnerable' only if one believes that a unique, tidy, simple answer must under all circumstances be extractable and must suffice. Rather, "... the overriding consideration in evaluating a grammar or any part of it is not whether it is simple, but whether it accounts for all the known facts."11 In syllabizing interludes it may occur that the resultant codas and onsets do not quite appear to match the notion of what is and what is not a genuine, structurally sound cluster, that is, an occurring word-initial or word-final group of consonants, in the language under discussion; indeed I postulated that in such contingencies the coda rather than the onset should bear the burden of 'irregularity'.12 But what I said in the preceding paragraphs makes it seem worthwhile to have another and closer look at these well-organized treatment of a language stripped down to regularity, but to account for all that occurs in a natural language, we must be content to live with the messiness that goes with it. To an orderly mind, this may be exasperating; but language is not something developed according to the strict rules of an experiment in a sterile test tube, but the product of many different factors, some in harmony with each other, some independent of each other, some counteracting each other. We should realize that language, a conglomerate of an undetermined number of subsystems, must be very hard, if not impossible, to describe in terms of just one system, however flexible and elaborate...." See also Pulgram 1967 (Sciences), 85-87. 10 Stockwell-Bowen-Fuenzalida 1956, 652 fn. 14. 11 Winter 1965, 486. 11 See Rule 5 in Chapter 3B, and Chapter 4D, above.

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apparent irregularities, and to dicuss their phonological status.13 I shall take as my point of departure an article on the consonant groups of Spanish, which I selected because the authors have thoroughly and competently examined their material, and subjected it to careful statistical analysis.14 (Spanish is, by the way, a NL.) I am taking the liberty of substituting my terminology for that of the authors (which will in no way distort their meaning or their findings). They use cluster for any group of consonants, whether homosyllabic or heterosyllabic, whether occurring or not. I shall use cluster for a homosyllabic and occurring group of consonants, whether coda or onset, and sequence for those groups of consonants which are dissolvable through syllabation into coda and onset, consisting of two clusters, or of two consonants, or of cluster and consonant or consonant and cluster. Where necessary I shall use the prefix para-, to name PARA-CLUSTER or PARA-SEQUENCE a consonantal group which occurs and must therefore be accounted for in a syllabic analysis but whose status is questionable. A group which does occur word-terminally as a cluster even though wordmedially it would be termed a sequence, or whose occurrence is marginal and uncertain in structure, is a para-cluster; a parasequence is therefore a group which upon syllabation delivers one or two para-clusters. Furthermore I shall use QUASI-CLUSTER and QUASI-SEQUENCE to name groups that are structurally sound but do not occur as clusters or sequences, thus causing structural, paradigmatic gaps. Finally, the terms QUASI-PARA-CLUSTER and QUASIPARA-SEQUENCE refer to groups that are both non-occurring and structurally non-sound, which means any group of consonants not fitting any of the earlier classes: these will be of merely statistical interest in tables where the number of component consonants " O'Connor-Trim 1953, 105, find irregularities — not surprisingly — especially in proper names, learned scientific terms, Anglicized foreign words (in English), rare and archaic words, slang and interjections, and unusual pronunciation variants. (It should be noted that none of these categories is safely and precisely definable, except circularly as exhibiting these irregular consonant groups.) They call them "unusual" and exclude them from their deliberations. " Saporta-Olson 1958.

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constitutes the criterion of classification (see immediately below).15 The statistics on Spanish consonant groups in a given corpus, arranged by number of consonants per group, are as follows.16 (Only sequences, not clusters, are dealt with here, since Saporta and Olson are interested in dissolvability. By dissolvability they mean that the group is syllabically divisible into a permissible coda plus permissible onset: two-consonant groups into two single consonants; three-consonant groups into a two-consonant cluster and a single consonant, in either order; more-than-three-consonant groups into a cluster and a single consonant, in either order, or into two clusters.) (1) Two-consonant groups (a) occurring and dissolvable 89 groups sequence (b) occurring and non-dissolvable: 39 groups para-sequence (c) non-occurring and dissolvable: 56 groups quasi-sequence (d) non-occurring and non-dissolvable17: quasi-para-sequence 216 groups 400 groups (2) Three-consonant groups (a) sequence 30 groups 15

22.25% 9.75% 14.00% 54.00% 100.00%

It may happen that what one would unhesitatingly call a sequence, like /ffl/ in oph-thalmology, turns up as word-initial cluster, as in phthisis — albeit shakily and uncertainly because this word and its derivatives, and the few other words that begin the same way, are often pronounced with initial /0/ or /t/. (Webster's Third Edition does not list /f0/ at all, except in cognate compounds where /f/ is assigned to one and /0/ to the next syllable: phthisis with /0/ or ¡t/, but aphthitalite with /f-0/, both words from the Greek stem (p8i-, «pGiveiv 'to waste away'.) The solution here is to view /f0/ as a foreign cluster, or as an English para-cluster with restricted distribution. (See also above, Chapter 4E.) " Saporta-Olson 1958, 263-264. 17 The terminology of Saporta-Olson 1958, for (a) to (d) is actual, marginal, virtual, and inadmissible. The categories, though under different names, were originally suggested by Vogt 1954, 33. See also Vogt 1942. The statistics under (1), above, are taken directly from Saporta-Olson, those under (2), (3), (4), below, are calculated from the context in Saporta-Olson.

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(b) para-sequence (c) quasi-sequence (d) quasi-para-sequence

95

25 groups 54 groups (not counted)18

(3) Four-consonant groups (a) sequence (b) para-sequence (c) quasi-sequence (d) quasi-para-sequence

0 groups 12 groups (not counted) (not counted)

(4) Five-consonant groups (a) sequence (b) para-sequence (c) quasi-sequence (d) quasi-para-sequence

0 groups 0 groups 0 groups (not counted)

In the two-consonant groups, the percentage of sequences is considerably greater than the percentage of para-sequences. But the true discrepancy between the two is better demonstrated in terms of actual occurrences in the text, where in a running count of 21,670 phonemes there were 1266 sequences and only 90 parasequences, a ratio of about 14 to 1.19 A similary lopsided proportion no doubt prevails in groups of more than two consonants. This but confirms one's expectation, which is indeed at the bottom of the terminological distinction between sequence and para-sequence, that only a small number of occurrences does not fit the distributional pattern of a language, occurrences which are best accommodated in the description by being assigned to a coexistent subsystem of one kind or another. In Spanish, /b/ does not occur word-finally except in obvious loanwords like club, for which there exists no exactly equivalent native Spanish word. Arguing whether club 'really' is or is not 18 Thefiguresunder "not counted" grow progressively larger as the number of constituent phonemes, and the number of their combinabilities into different groups, increases. This is the reason, no doubt, why Saporta-Olson made no count of them; I see no urgent cause for remedying the lack. Naturally, in the absence of an actual count for all four classes, percentages for any of them cannot be given. " Saporta-Olson 1958, 263-264.

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'Spanish' cannot lead to a reasonable conclusion, but only to a definition of 'Spanish' — that is, calling club a Spanish word makes Spanish a language that has word-final /b/, calling it nonSpanish makes Spanish a language that does not have final /b/. The judicious solution, it seems to me, is to state that club occurs in Spanish, that indeed it is indispensable (until a full-fledged native Spanish word comes to be customarily used in its place), but that the incidence of word-final /b/ in Spanish is very low, that native speakers of Spanish may Hispanize this coda in some manner (though it has been noted that Hispanization of the coda is less pressing a problem than that of the onset20), and that all words having it are provably and often transparently loans (though an ultra-orthodox descriptivist may balk at this statement on the grounds that it belongs to an historical and not to a descriptive argument) — from all of which it follows that words with final /b/ are loans that have not been fully naturalized in Spanish. How does one then deal with word-medial /bd/ in Spanish? It occurs in few words, and must be regarded as learned (inherited Latin /bd/ would long since have been reduced to /b/); but since at the same time it occurs ('learned' not having necessarily reference to a quality of the speaker or the context) in some rather commonly and frequently used words like abdicar, abdomen, obduración, etc., it cannot be declared truly un-Spanish. To be sure, the syllableclosing consonant of this sequence is normally pronounced as a bilabial fricative [0], or even omitted in popular speech, whereby the sequence is phonetically somewhat 'softened' in its first part, or resolved into a simple onset.21 (This is, by the way, a good example of the tendency toward open syllabicity, especially noticeable in Spanish.) But where the sequence perseveres, it ought to be M

See above, p. 81. " This applies notably to so common a household word as doctor /dok-tór/, with the non-permissible final /k/, which is pronounced either [doy-tór] or simply [do-tór]. If the word is called 'learned' because of its phonological shape, it surely is in no sense learned with respect to users and occurrence, especially since most frequently it means, like English doctor, 'physician'. The same is true of cognates like doctrinero 'priest, religous preceptor' (especially among the Indians of Latin America), doctrino 'inmate of an orphanage', and (perhaps to a lesser degree) doctrina.

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syllabized ...b-d..., according to the Principle of the irregular coda. Someone may, however, propose the syllabation ...-bd... (a-bdicar) on the evidence of the word-initial bd in bdellium 'bdellium' (an aromatic gum resin), which is palpably a loan and not part of the lexicon of most speakers of Spanish, yet cannot be replaced, any more than club, by another lexeme of a more properly Spanish appearance.22 (In this instance, 'learned' does connote a condition of the speaker, and of the context. The ordinary speaker, if ever faced with bdellium, would neither hear nor pronounce the /b/, unless he had it explicitly called to his attention, and even then he would find it 'difficult'.) The third possibility of syllabation, ...bd-... (abd-icar) has of course nothing to recommend itself. Excluding the Procrustean severity of eliminating from 'Spanish' all words containing /bd/, and the irritating compromise of calling it a Spanish cluster because of bdellium alone, one is only left with assigning it the status of para-cluster or para-sequence. Of these, the second (ab-dicar) is preferable to the first (a-bdicar) because, in extension of Rule 5 on the irregular coda, a para-coda (J...b-/) followed by a regular onset (J-d.../) is preferable to a regular coda, or open syllable (/...a-/) followed by a para-onset (/-bd.../). Among Spanish words with three-consonant and four-consonant groups are items like perspectiva and transcripción, both of which contain para-sequences. Of the divisions pe-rspectiva, per-spectiva, " Cf. Saporta-Olson 1958, 263: "Thus, if we say that /-b/ [word-final] does not occur in Spanish, /-bd-/ [word-medial] is not dissolvable [is not a sequence but a para-sequence]; but if we say that it occurs, as in club /klub/ 'club', then obviously /-bd-/ is analyzable as a sequence of /-b/ [coda] and /d-/ [onset]. The data presented below disregard those sequences which occur only in loanwords." This would be a good criterion for disregarding such sequences — if 'loanword* were not then defined, on the purely synchronic level, as a word that exhibits, possibly among other peculiarities, such an irregular distribution of phonemes; but this renders the argument and the definition circular and useless. To avoid this one must have recourse to extra-phonological (some might even reprovingly call them extra-linguistic) criteria, and non-synchronic, historical criteria (which many orthodox descriptivists would peremptorily reject) for the definition of 'loan', before one makes certain judgments on phonotactic propriety. To me this does not seem objectionable as discovery procedure (though it will form no part of the descriptive statement); but to some linguists it does.

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pers-pectiva, persp-ectiva, and tra-nscripción, transcripción, transcripción, transc-ripción, transcr-ipción, none delivers plain clusters on both sides or on either side of the boundary. But applying Rule 5 and its extension with respect to para-cluster, the syllabations perspectiva and trans-cripción, both with para-cluster in the coda and regular onset (single consonant or cluster), emerge as the phonotactically admissible ones; they are, in a manner of speaking, the least troublesome ones both phonemically in Spanish structure and phonetically to a speaker of Spanish. But unless the phonotactic constraints at word boundaries are actually changed (which could come to pass if for some reason a rephonologization were to take place),23 many speakers will tend toward a pronunciation pes-pe-tiva, or per-pe-tiva, or per-es-pe-tiva and tras-cri-ción (observe that also the para-sequences /kt/ in the first word, and /ps/ in the second are here eliminated), with admissible syllable terminals at all boundaries.24 The question arises now whether a para-sequence can occur in such a shape as to force a division, not into para-cluster at the coda plus regular cluster or single consonant at the onset, but into two para-clusters at both coda and onset. The answer is that it cannot, since no limit is assigned, at least in theory, to the complexity of the para-cluster in the coda. Consequently, the coda is augmentable beyond the maximum cluster by any number of consonants that need to be detached from the onset, up to the point where the onset becomes a maximum cluster.25 But does this imply that there is no practical limit to the tolerance of the coda? Since para-sequences are the hallmark of loans, including learned words from an earlier stage of the same language, that have not been fully naturalized in the borrowing idiom, the real problem is whether some words are excluded from becoming 23

See below, p. 99-100; see also above, p. 69. See also above, p. 51. 86 The term 'maximum cluster' was suggested by Valencia 1965,4, and names "[a cluster] that cannot be increased by one or more consonants without becoming a non-permissible cluster [para-cluster]." In other words, the onset must never be greater than a maximum cluster, the coda may be if necessary. See also Valencia 1966, 23. 24

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loans because of their phonological incompatibility, even beyond the tolerance of the coda, with the borrowing language. One rather suspects that there exists such a limit, that there are items so outrageously foreign in their phonological constitution that they never even reach the point where, after borrowing, phonological naturalization begins to take its normal course.26 But it would be awkward to undertake a demonstration proving that among all the numerous words which a language did NOT acquire by way of loans, some were spurned because they were phonologically beyond redemption at the hands, or rather the mouths, of the borrowers. Yet one is disposed to believe that speakers of, say, Italian or French or English — including even those persons who enjoy garnishing their speech with foreign flourishes, and who consciously or subconsciously take advantage of the freedom to adapt loans to their tongues, even to risking para-clusters in the coda — would scarcely be tempted to appropriate the German Herbstzeitlose 'autumn crocus'. The word flaunts a medial six-consonant sequence divisible into two German clusters, /...rpst-ts.../; but neither Italian nor French nor English speakers, though they all can manage initial /ts/, would care to bite off a final /rpst/, no matter how great their appetite or their tolerance. That is no doubt the reason why in Spanish all classes of five-consonant groups (see above, p. 95) have a membership zero: there is not even a loanword in Spanish with so monstrous — for Spanish — a para-sequence. Instead of subjecting them to phonological adaptation, a language may adopt and absorb some hitherto non-permissible groups of consonants, which thereby acquire the status of regular clusters and sequences. This means that the language is undergoing a change in its rules of phoneme distribution through borrowing. The loans effecting the change may originate in a subcode of the same idiom (this may be called internal borrowing), which is tantamount to " Saporta-Olson 1958, 261 fn. 2: "It is ... worth noting that the effect of 'rapid speech' is in general to simplify non-dissolvable [groups, i.e., parasequences] to dissolvable ones [i.e., sequences]." This is no doubt correct; but I do not believe that rapidity of speech is a necessary condition for diachronic simplification of consonant groups. See Fischer-J0rgensen 1952, 38, on the phonological stability of loans.

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saying that one of several coexistent non-distinctive variants comes to be preferred consistently, is eventually used exclusively, and thus acquires distinctive status; or the loan may originate in another dialect altogether, in another language, if you will (which is external borrowing).27 An example of internal borrowing is provided by Modern French, where owing to the increasing frequency of the omission of optional /a/, that is, by the spread of a hitherto non-prestigious style of speech and its concomitant growing social acceptance and respectability, such new clusters as /ss/ (Je suis /§sqi), /pt/ (petit /pti/), /lv/ (levez-vous /lve-vu/) are ceasing to be substandard.28 External borrowing may be exemplified by word-initial /si, sm, sn/ in English, clusters appropriated from German (mostly by way of Yiddish) which are in the process of losing their somewhat comic coloration and of becoming normal, at least in some dialects if not yet in general American English: schmalz (with reference to a greasy kind of musical performance, German Schmalz 'lard'), shlemil, shmock, shnook, etc. The numerical disparity between sequences and para-sequences in Spanish is less great in the three-consonant than in the twoconsonant groups. It can hardly be otherwise, because, first, as the number of component phonemes increases, the number of permissible clusters decreases, and second, as the number of permissible ones decreases, a greater number borrowed from other structures is forced into the marginal region of para-sequences. In the four-consonant groups, then, where there is no fully native Spanish sequence, there are still 12 para-sequences; that is, none of the four-consonant groups that occur can be accommodated within the distributional rules of standard Spanish, so that all of them must belong, by definition, to some other coexistent system. The syllabation of Finnish presents an interesting and instructive problem.29 Finnish is no doubt a NL: lexemes generally retain their "

Cf. Pulgram 1962. Cf. Pulgram 1961, and 1967 (Trends), Section 3. " Since I do not know Finnish I put pertinent questions to three linguists who were kind enough to answer my inquiries by letter: Lauri Karttunen (8 Decern-

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phonological independence (terminal allophones, non-distinctive stress on the first syllable), though some occur as clitics and form nexus. It is generally said that word-finally only /n, r, 1, t, s/ occur, word-initially all consonants; no clusters occur in either position. (Non-standard dialects influenced by Swedish or Russian may have, by way of external borrowing, word-initial clusters; and the dialects of the Rauma district have accepted, by way of internal borrowing, some clusters through syncope of the vowel after the initial consonant.) Consequently words with medial two-consonant groups (Jks, mp, hm, hi, hv/) whose first member is not /n, r, 1, t, s/ appear to contain a para-sequence. But one is surprised to discover that a number of altogether common, everyday, and indisputably native Finnish words belong to that category: /yksi/ 'one', /maksa/ 'liver', /paksu/ 'thick', /ksi/ the suffix morpheme marking the translative case of the noun, /kumpu/ 'hill', /parempi/ 'better' (all comparative forms of the adjective end in /mpi/), /lehmae/ 'cow', /tyhmas/ 'stupid', /lahjia/ 'gift', /tyhjse/ 'empty', /vahva/ 'strong', /kahvi/ (borrowed but naturalized) 'coffee'. (In non-standard dialects these para-sequences may be regularized by the insertion of a vowel: /lehemae/ 'cow', /tyhyjas/ 'empty', /vahava/ 'strong' — note the vowel harmany; but /ks, mp/ are never so resolved.) It will scarcely be proper and convincing to postulate para-sequences of such frequent occurrence in native Finnish words, and we seem to have reached an impasse.30 Interrogation of my correspondents revealed certain facts of Finnish phonotactics that have some bearing on the question. In earlier forms of Finnish, consonants could in fact terminate words, and while most of them disappeared very early, the loss of final /k, h/ came later — still early enough in the western dialects so as to leave no written traces, but only in the nineteenth century in the ber 1965), Ilse Lehiste (16 January 1966), and Frances Karttunen (17 March 1966). I am very grateful to them for their help. They are of course not responsible for my deductions. ,0 This was the gist of the well-taken objection to my rules of syllabation, raised by Fliflet, in the discussion following Pulgram 1965 (Consonant). I had no ready answer at the time, but I hope to suggest an acceptable one now.

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eastern dialects, where there is literary evidence for them. Indeed the loss of word-final /k/ is in some ways not yet complete: the Finnish imperative /osta/ 'buy' goes back to an older */ostak/; but when the next word begins with a /k/ (and, one must add, forms a nexus with the antecedent word), the final /k/ is retained: /ostakkirja/ 'buy a book' (I think I am correct here in not writing a word boundary, though Finnish linguists do, /ostak kirja/: see my remarks on transcription, above, p. 89-90; note also that in the subsequent phonemic transcriptions I mark the syllable boundary only at those places — at the lexeme junction — where it is important for the present argument); when the next word begins with a vowel, the imperative retains its vocalic ending, or there occurs between it and the following word a double glottal stop: [osta-auto], [os-ta?-?au-to], 'buy a car', the second of which may well be interpreted as an optional syllable-bounding (in this case also lexeme-bounding) device; finally, when the next word begins with a consonant, the original final /k/ is assimilated to that consonant, resulting in a geminate: /ostas-se/ 'buy it', /ostav-vene/ 'buy a boat', /ostah-hevonen/ 'buy a horse', /ostaj-iuna/ 'buy a train', etc. This relationship between word-ending and wordbeginning presupposes that the word boundary is not signaled, otherwise assimilation of final to initial would be impossible; and the requisite continuity implies the presence of what I call a nexus. Since furthermore the stress is always on the first syllable, hence non-distinctive, it is not a feature that plays a role in nexus-formation: whether the second word of the nexus has 'no stress' or 'secondary stress' or 'full stress' is irrelevant, since stress has no linguistic function to begin with. Now if all this is so, one need not have recourse to an older form */ostak/ to explain the current geminates descriptively (though of course the historical explanation remains exactly that), but one can simply posit the rule that imperative plus object forms, in Finnish, a nexus that has a feature of gemination at the lexeme boundaries (including an optional geminate glottal stop where two vowels become contiguous and no other consonant gemination may take place). Hence through this syntactic doubling, and because geminates must be analyzed

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in Finnish not as single 'long' but as two successive identical phonemes, all consonants, and not only /n, r, 1, t, s/ may be regarded as occurring in final (syllable-final, and implicitly wordfinal) position.31 In other words, a syllable ending in a consonant is not really irregular in Finnish, and a medial two-consonant group may be regarded as a sequence rather than a para-sequence. One should also observe that in the case of geminates, which constitute a large proportion of the sequences in Finnish, the syllable preceding the syllabic boundary has a phonetically mild or incomplete closure: when the geminates are continuants, the syllable boundary lies within the duration of a single long phone, when they are not continuants, the first half of the geminate is imploded and not exploded. (I shall return to this phenomenon in the discussion of the geminates in Chapter 5C, below.) Finnish has also some medial three-consonant groups, of the type /C s sC/ or /C S C 1 C 1 /, where C s is a sonorant, Q C j identical consonants; for example: /konsti/ 'trick', /palsta/ 'lot', /hanska/ 'glove', /synkkae/ 'dark', /hamppu/ 'hemp', /valtti/ 'trump'. These are ordinary enough words, but I gather they are not numerous. They must be syllabized /Css-C/ and /C S C 1 -C 1 /. This leads to twoconsonant codas, which must be regarded as para-clusters since there are certainly no native Finnish words with final consonant clusters; hence three-consonant medial groups are para-sequences. My Finnish correspondents concur on this. Lauri Karttunen: "If geminate consonants are phonemicized as clusters [in my terminology, a s sequences] of two consonants, as I feel they have to be for certain other reasons, the earlier statement about /n, r, 1, t, s/ being the only consonants that occur in word-final position has to be modified. In certain limited, morphologically specified contexts, e.g., in the 2nd pers. imperative sing, and in the negative form of verbs, every consonant can occur word-finally as the first member of a boundary geminate." Frances Karttunen: "You are quite right that instances such as the imperative plus object (/ostak kirja/) show that the restriction on final /n, r, 1, s, t/ is not correct." Lehiste: "The opposition between long and short consonants takes place only in intervocalic position; there are no contrasts in initial and final position. This implies clearly that the contrast depends on the placement of the syllable boundary .... The single intervocalic consonant is equivalent to the initial consonant in that it does not participate in the long-short opposition. Actually there is a good case for not talking about a prosodeme of length in the case of Finnish, but simply of clusters [in my terminology, sequences] of like consonants."

31

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For native words this is, again, an awkward solution at best. But the paucity of such items, and the fact that all these para-clusters in the coda end either in /s/ or in the first half of a geminate consonant, and thus do not in either case produce a severe phonetic closure of the syllable, render the proposed syllabation acceptable. Moreover, all the historical evidence cited demonstrates that the phonotactics of the word-final position have been in a process of change for some time; indeed the existence of word-final consonants is largely hidden in morphophonemic alternation (/osta/ and /ostaC/, for example). There prevails, then, a condition of vacillation between two coexistent subsystems, such as I showed to exist in French.32 To this must be added the fact that non-standard dialects of Finnish which do not obey the same clustering constraints may exert some influence. All of this suffices to explain the state of evolution in which standard Finnish finds itself at present with respect to word-final phonotactics, and which makes it impossible for the linguist to fashion a description that is neatly unequivocal and accounts for ALL the data in a SINGLE rigid system. One simply cannot escape the fact that in language, which is human behavior and therefore constantly changes, the past, the present, and the future in some measure overlap in the present, and that in every structure there lives one or another aspect that, at the moment of observation and description, is more strikingly and blatantly in flux than some others, and therefore cannot be synchronically captured and presented as a relatively static trait — relatively static, of course, because nothing in language is absolutely static. It may, however, be possible to make surmises on the trend and the future course of evolution, and thus to assign a somewhat preferred status in the description to one of the contemporaneous alternatives.33 I cannot persuade myself that a linguistic analysis performed according to such theoretical premises must be regarded as lacking in precision: the result of an investigation cannot be any M

See above, p. 100. This I have attempted to do for French (in phonology, morphology, syntax) in Pulgram 1967 (Trends); I am not capable of performing an analogous task for Finnish because of my ignorance of that language. 35

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more sharp in outline and unruffled in particulars than is the object under scrutiny. C. GEMINATES

The term 'geminate' is generally used with a phonological meaning, in contrast with 'simple'; often 'long' and 'short' are employed as alternative terms, repectively. Both pairs are unsatisfactory from a phonetic point of view, however: the first because repeated versus non-repeated articulation of an allophone is not involved, the second because even though continuants can actually be modified in duration, plosives by definition cannot (except by the device, usually employed for evoking the impression of a longer duration, of holding articulation at the implosion stage and delaying explosion). In my text, 'geminate' has the phonological meaning, regardless of phonetic realization (and, needless to say, without reference to spelling). A language may contrast geminates and singles in any position in the word, initial, medial, and final, and implicitly at syllable terminals (but not syllable-medially; see below). But if a language has geminates only word-medially, and if they occur between vowels — as is the case in standard Italian: fat to /fatto/ 34 'done' versus fato /fato/ 'fate' — they cannot appear as a cluster on either side of the syllabic boundary, hence need to be divided: /VCVCjV/, not /VCICi-V/ or /V-CjCjV/. Let us posit that — and this is also the case in Italian — all consonants may appear as medial geminates, all consonants appear as initial singles, but only /m, n, 1, r/ as final singles. This leads to the consequence that /VC 1 -C 1 V/ is admissible only if / C J I C J / is /mm, nn, 11, rr/. 35 But this poses once 84

I prefer /fdtto/ to /fdt:o/ for reasons to be stated presently. For a general discussion of Italian geminates see Romeo 1967. 36 The normally cited distributional restriction in word-final position disregards unassimilated foreign and learned words; or rather, lest the definition of foreignism be circular, a word is viewed as foreign or learned if it does not conform to this phonotactic restriction: yacht /¿at/, fiat /fiat/. Yet one cannot help wondering about the foreignness of the word Fiat, a make of automobile, which is as common and frequent as any word in the Italian language, and

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more the problem of how to deal with the other geminates that seemingly can occur neither as clusters nor as sequences. Given the structural status of word-medial geminates in Italian, and the numerous altogether native and common Italian lexemes in which they occur, to regard them as para-sequences and thereby to confer upon them a taint of oddity, does not seem a recommendable solution. Nor can one claim, as I did for Finnish, that we are faced with a phonological phenomenon in flux, hence tractable in terms of coexistent subsystems, of which one may eventually prevail over the other: the contrast of Italian geminate and single consonants goes all the way back to Latin in an uninterrupted history, and there is no sign that it is about to be abandoned or is weakening in modern standard Italian. Besides, since all consonants occur as geminates word-medially, but only four of them as singles word-finally, the number of different para-sequences would be distressingly and embarrassingly large. Yet in one way Finnish and Italian resemble each other in the matter of geminates. It will be recalled that the traditional severe restriction on Finnish word-final consonants could be rescinded in view of the allomorphs which do in fact end in a consonant forming the first half of a geminate.36 In Italian, too, there exists a similar phenomenon of morphophonemic alternation involving gemination, called syntactic doubling. It occurs at the boundary of two lexemes constituting a nexus, in such a way that the initial consonant of the second lexeme, if it stands in intervocalic position, is geminated.37 For example, it occurs in the triple nexus of preposition plus article plus noun, but only between the first and the second, not between the second and the third member of the nexus (at least in standard Italian; central and especially southern which is universally pronounced with a final /t/ and without the addition of a support vowel [a]. Nor can an Italian converse normally without such words as sport, sud 'south', nord 'north', and others. I am speaking here of the standard language. Some Sicilian dialects, for example, have also word-initial geminates (see Fodale 1964), hence permit the syllabation /... V-CjC, V.../. 36 See above, p. 103-104. " For the history and description of this phenomenon see Hall 1964.

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Italian are more prodigal with syntactic doubling and use it in more places — as do native speakers of these dialects when they employ the standard language). Thus the phrase de la tavola is always della tavola /dellatávola/, su la tavola is sulla tavola /sullatávola/, da la tavola is dalla tavola /dallatávola/ ; but con la either remains or is optionally (but, some claim, not quite so elegantly) colla, and pella for per la is obsolete; if a and da are followed by a nominal without intervening article, doubling occurs also but does not usually show itself in spelling and is not obligatory in all instances: a casa is /akkása/, da Roma is /darróma/, eie; in the nexus of a lexeme with stressed final vowel followed by a clitic, doubling is optional: dà me lo 'give it to me' is either /dámelo/ or /dámmelo/, e buono• 'it is good' is either /ebuóno/ or /ebbuóno/, va bene 'all right' is either /vabéne/ or /vabbéne/, città di Roma is either /òittadiróma/ or /öittaddirroma/. (Literate Northerners, not hospitable to syntactic doubling because of their dialect background, generally do not articulate geminates where orthography does not authorize it.) It appears, then, that the incidence of doubling is restricted, somewhat irregular, and difficult if not impossible to state in a general rule; as a result, descriptions of it are reduced to being mere lists.38 This is no doubt due to the fact that what we call 88

The best that even a careful and competent describer can do is this (by Hall 1948, 15): "After certain forms ... a single initial consonant er /Cr CI/ of any element following in the same pitch-phrase [i.e., nexus] is doubled, as in the examples in Table II." See also the learner's textbook by Hall 1958, 34: "In general, syntactic doubling occurs after all words which, in writing, end in a stressed vowel; after a number of prepositions; after stressed verb forms of one syllable; and after a few other words." Cf. also Weinrich 1958, 52: "Vom Toskanischen her ist die Anlautverdoppelung auch in die italienische Schriftsprache eingegangen und ist Lehrgegenstand in den normativen Grammatiken. In kaum einem Punkt divergieren jedoch die Landschaften stärker als in den Regeln der Anlautverdoppelung. Fast jede Stadt hat ihre eigene Liste von Wörtern [N.B.], die beim nachfolgenden Wort Anlautverdoppelung bewirken, wobei es den Wörtern selber nicht anzusehen ist, ob sie verdoppelnde Kraft haben oder nicht." I myself have the impression that syntactic doubling is, in the standard language, becoming a recessive trait, partly because Tuscan itself, otherwise the model of correctness, does not furnish consistent and clear guidance on what is the 'proper' pronunciation, partly because doubling is practiced more widely in the non-standard Roman and southern and Sicilian dialects, so that the anxious, rule-obeying, standard-conscious speaker tends

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and learn as 'standard Italian' is, to a much greater degree than other standard languages, not based upon a single local or social dialect that came, for a variety of non-linguistic reasons, to be elevated to the rank of standard dialect, but betrays in many of its features a multi-dialectal origin, albeit with a powerful and clearly recognizable preponderance of Tuscan Italian. The cause of this is manifestly to be found in the absence, for so many centuries (and still continuing today), of a single region, with its dialect, that was the cultural, political, spiritual center of all of Italy and therefore set the linguistic tone; after all, until a century ago, there was no 'Italy' in any but the geographic or historic sense. The relative strength of Tuscan since the fourteenth century is mostly due to three persons — Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio — rather than to a regional predominance of Tuscany (the Tuscan Renaissance notwithstanding). Yet no matter how elusive and amorphous in its occurrence, syntactic doubling is a fact of Italian speech. And since all consonants occur as geminates, also many non-geminate medial groups should be regarded as sequences rather than para-sequences. To be sure, sequences other than geminates are not frequent, and the words which harbor them may well sound peculiar or foreign to the native speaker; for example, genetliaco /ge-net-li-a-ko/ 'birthday' is a word reserved for solemn, rhetorical pronouncements and does not occur in current speech. (The ordinary word is compleanno /kom-ple-an-no/ [kom-ple-an-no].) But since syllablefinal /t/ must be posited in all the numerous instances of /tt/, it is best to view /tl/ as a sequence rather than a para-sequence, especially since the syllable-final /t/ of the latter may be pronounced [f], without explosion, as is that of the former. That this kind of analysis, however, renders difficult an altogether unshakable distinction between sequence and para-sequence, and of course cluster and para-cluster, I am quite ready to concede. It is true in language that what is clearly and cleanly a part of the structure to shy away from it as provincial and vulgar, unless it is sanctioned by orthography.

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now, may have been on its indeterminate and vague edges only yesterday; and what is still in that marginal position today, may be central tomorrow. And since the change does not happen in a leap but through gradual transformation on the etic level, the 'in'-form and the 'out'-form exist side by side, and it is impossible to fix exactly the moment when the change of status takes place, to assign blandly and firmly regular or para- status to every consonantal group. Our emic bookkeeping — for that is all it is — simply recognizes a fait accompli and seeks to deal with it in the most convenient and systematic manner. Since the normally occurring word-final consonants as listed by Italian grammars are all continuants (/m, n, r, 1/), and since wordmedial syllable-final consonants are all first halves of geminates, one could say — as I have noted repeatedly — that the phonetic closure of the syllable in these instances is relatively mild. And since furthermore a great many Italian geminates have evolved diachronically from Latin by assimilation of adjoining unlike consonants (Latin factum > Italian fatto), one could regard gemination historically as implementing the tendency toward (though not the completion of) open syllabicity — a tendency which, by the way, is observable in many other aspects of the development from Latin to Italian.39 Spanish does not distinguish geminate from single consonants, except in the case of the word-medial dental trill : pero /péro/ 'but' — perro /pérro/ 'dog'. The latter is a regular geminate, and the syllable boundary (always phonetically unsignaled) lies between *—

the two halves: /pér-ro/ [pér-ro]. One may possibly raise the objection here that the word-initial dental trill is also regularly a geminate (long) r, as in rio 'river', which seems to indicate that long r can occur word-initially, and that therefore perro should be syllabized /pé-rro/. But this is not a desirable analysis. It is better to retain the phonological contrast /r/ versus /rr/, with the geminate restricted to word-medial position, and to assign the word-initial long r to the phoneme /r/, as a positional (word-initial) variant "

For details see Kim 1965, especially 95-98.

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[r:]. Hence one phonemicizes as follows: pero /pe-ro/ [pe-ro], perro /per-ro/ [p£r-ro], rio /ri-o/ [r:i-o]. 40 1 cite this fairly simple problem of phonological analysis so as to show how syllabation contributes to, or at least corroborates, its solution. In languages that do not contrast geminates and simple consonants phonemically, there may arise occasions where the use of a geminate allophone (whichever way this 'gemination' is realized) serves to make a non-phonemic distinction between words which may otherwise be homophonous (though of course such a distinction on the phonetic level does not create genuine minimal pairs): this happens in English holy and wholly, which I have already mentioned in a different context,41 and in French il aime /i-lem/ 'he loves' and il Vaime /i-lem/ 'he loves her', which may be pronounced homophonously [i-lem], or as [i-lem] versus [il-lem], respectively.42 In the case of plosives, as in sheep-pen, mock-king, front-tooth the syllabation is — if the items are regarded as nexus, which they are — /si-pen/, /mok-Ig/, /fron-tu9/, phonetically [si:p=psn] or [si:p-pen] (scarcely [si:-pen]), [mok=kIrj] or [mok-klq], [fr5nt=tu:0] or [fronHu:0] (scarcely [fr5n-tu:9]).43 Drawing up a set of rules on the syllabation of geminates in a language that does not permit them as coda or onset, leads (as I found out on attempting it) to a fairly complicated-looking and lengthy statement. But no such statement is actually needed be40

The [r] of [pe-ro], if it is trilled, can be of duration equal to that of [per-ro], and since in the latter no phonetic boundary is signaled the two words may on occasion sound homophonous. There is little danger in their being confused because of the unrelated contexts in which they occur. But mostly speakers will refrain from pronouncing them homophonously anyway: if [rr] is a trill, [r] frequently is a single flap, resembling more a [d] (as in the occasional British

pronunciation of very, caricatured as veddy). 41

See above, p. 49. Malmberg 1943,1944, and 1962 (Structure) phonologizes French geminates in essentially the same manner but syllabizes them differently, assigning a different function to the syllable boundary. 43 For supporting phonetic and spectrograph«: evidence on all these allophones see Lehiste 1960 and 1962. See also above, p. 49. 42

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cause it contains nothing that does not organically flow from an application of the Rules of syllabation — as one should hope to be the case if those Rules have the generality claimed for them. D. SYLLABATION AND DISJUNCTURE

Some may say that juncture, and in particular disjuncture, or internal open juncture, is a dead horse no longer in need of flogging.44 But even if this is true — as I think it is — a post mortem may be instructive. In English, and in other similarly functioning NL, nouns may be joined in sequences like night rate, match box, house keeper. Without ascribing linguistic moment to orthography, one may nonetheless believe that the existence of the alternate spellings night-rate, match-box, house-keeper is not entirely without significance, for if the two parts of the constructs were always and necessarily indépendant words in every respect, it would hardly have seemed useful to anyone to put a dash in between them, let alone to run them together, like nightrate, matchbox, housekeeper. Conversely, no one would reasonably choose to separate orthographically the morphemes of nightmare, either as night-mare or as night mare, if for no other reason than at least the intuitive one that no day mare exists and that no mare in the sense of 'female 44

The coup de grâce was administered by Lehiste 1960; see also Lehiste 1965. More recently, with regard to English in particular, see Hoard 1966, who, after extensive reading and listening tests, concludes: "Juncture as a phoneme, or any kind of structural unit in English, is rejected. Junctural differences are, rather, differences in the grouping of phonemes into syllables and/or manifestations of higher level requirements different from simple syllable-to-syllable transitions." (104-105) "The present study indicates that juncture is maintained in connected speech, but that juncture is not in itself, from a taxonomic viewpoint, an emic unit. Rather, the data suggests [s/c] that the syllable is an emic unit in English and that juncture is a manifestation of a difference in the location of a syllable boundary and/or is the manifestation of properties of an emic unit (or units) higher than the syllable in phonology." (106) With this I agree in principle, but not in the particular that the syllable is an emic unit. Nor do I determine the place of the syllable boundary in the same manner as does Hoard.

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horse' has anything to do with it. (The morpheme mare of nightmare has a parallel in cran of cranberry, neither appears in a context other than these compounds, and neither is, in current English, a free morpheme with a meaning of its own. The first goes back to a root meaning 'spirit', and the second to 'crane'—but this information is irrelevant to the contemporary user and the descriptive analyst.) The unity of the first three examples cannot be morphological, for everyone, not only the linguist, recognizes that each of their components is a complete lexeme (precisely what the non-linguist does not recognize in nightmare). The unity is phonological, and the construct is a nexus: one of the two words is a clitic, and the whole item has but one main stress. If this is so, then the syllabation of the items cited is /nai-tret/, /mEets-boks/, /hau-ski-pa-/. But in that case, the first transcribes not only night-rate but also nitrate. Enters at this point the phoneme of disjuncture, which allegedly occurs between night and rate, but not of course inside of nitrate. And pairs like grade A and gray day, an aim and a name, white shoes and why choose are distinguished from one another, not by presence versus absence of disjuncture, but, some say, by different placement of it in agreement with the occurrence of lexeme boundaries in otherwise identical strings of phonemes. It surely cannot be denied that the two members of each pair MAY be completely homophonous, that there DOES NOT HAVE TO BE present any kind of signal differentiating them: one need but listen without prejudice to come to that conclusion.45 If they are homophonous, the absence of lexeme boundary signals is implied, and each member of the pair is a nexus. Hence the syllabation for either member of the pair is /gre-de/, /a-n6m/, /toaj-tsiiz/. Nor can it be denied that a speaker may choose to distinguish the members of each pair, for reasons of clarity, for example, in which case he pronounces, as it were, the lexeme boundary. This 46

Only the absence of disjunctural features can explain a newt for an original an ewt, an apron for a napron (these correspond exactly to a name and an aim, except that both members of the last pair rather than just one are in the current lexicon). See also above, Chapter 2, fn. 4.

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is accomplished, it has been found, by using word-final and wordinitial allophones at either side of the boundary, and not by employing a special kind of allophone of a phoneme of disjuncture.46 In other words, there is present a signal of word boundary, rather than a special signal of disjuncture.47 But once wordboundaries are thus marked, the nexus is of course dissolved and we are face to face with two words. And if that is so, each of the two words has, by definition, its own main stress — and whether one stress is phonetically weaker than the other, or whether they are equally strong, is a matter of phonemic indifference, a phonetic feature that is superseded by the presence of other signals that assign full word identity to each member of the former nexus. Hence the intrinsic homophony of the two nexus a name and an aim, both /a-nem/, is circumvented, if there is a need or desire for it, by a name /e nem/ [e ne:m] versus an aim ¡in em/ [en e:m]. Now it is of course true that the last item contains an internal contradiction in that it has the allomorph an, whose purpose it is to create a nexus, yet at the same time is supposed to be composed of two words. The solution would be to say a aim /e em/ [e e:m]; but since this would be regarded as substandard from a morphological point of view, one might compromise and pronounce [e n6:m] — at which point the pronunciation collides inevitably with that of a name [e n6:m]. Morphological and phonological exigencies simply work at cross purposes here, without a feasible solution that satisfies both. (See above, Chapter 2 fn. 4.) When there is available a word-terminal allophone at the junction, it may be used (or has to be used if it is an obligatory one); for example, why choose " See Lehiste 1960. " Kurath 1964, 151-152, finds that in the phrases my coat and like oats the /k/ is realized as a postpausal or "strong" and prepausal or "weak" allophone, respectively, and sees in this the marking of the word boundary. I should add, however, that the word boundary does not have to be marked by this or by any other means, and that either phrase can be pronounced as a nexus with the same allophone of /k/ and the same syllabation: not /mdj k6t/ and /Idjk ots/, but /mai-k6t/ and /laj-k6ts/, with the second pair probably of more frequent occurrence than the first. (C/. the remarks on at all and a tall, above, Chapter 3, fn. 36.)

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/bai tsûz/ [bai tsû:z] versus white shoes /luâjt 5ûz/ [bâjj sû:z], the latter with a final unreleased [fl. 48 That a single semantic item should occur in the same dialect in two phonologically different shapes, either as a nexus /nâj-tret/ or as two words /nâjt rét/ is not in the least odd. Indeed coexistence of such forms is the precondition for the development of what is often called an analytic into a synthetic construct. For example, the compound deeply derives its second morpheme from Old English lie, Middle English lich 'body' (as still in lichgate, lychgate 'the roofed gate of the churchyard under which rests the bier containing the dead body at the funeral'; cf. also German Leiche 'corpse'), hence consisted originally of two juxtaposed lexemes; eventually the second lost, together with its literal meaning, its indépendant phonological status and became a clitic, ultimately a bound morpheme, occurring as a typical adverb marker at the end of adjectives. (This morphological downgrading is at least in part responsible for the phonological reduction of lich to ly.) But there can be no doubt that at a given period in the history of the English language, lich as a full noun and lich as a clitic coexisted, as older forms and younger forms always coexist in subcodes because change does not take place in leaps from one stage to another, with the two-word phrase eventually being completely abandoned in favor of the one-word bimorphemic construct. It is of course impossible to foretell whether, say, night-rate will ever be exclusively /nai-tret/, and thus always homophonous with nitrate, and never /nàjt rét/ under any circumstances. Certainly some such nominal nexus have become indissolvable, as is shown by their phonemes; e.g. watchman is invariably /uotsman/, the second lexeme having /a/ as compared with /ae/ of man, though still being, unlike ly, recognizable as a lexeme also to the non-linguist on Accordingly, one may make the following triple distinction: the nexus white house /tcajt-hdys/ [bait-hâus]; the two words white house /hjâjt hâys/ [h)âit hâys]; and the nexus White House /hjâjt-hays/ [bâjt-hays]. And one may note that final [{], not being an obligatory final allophone, is more likely to occur where it aids in marking the word boundary (i.e., in the middle item) than where it is just a nexus-medial syllable boundary marker (in the first and third item). 48

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grounds other than phonological. Yet it may even happen that a bilexemic nexus becomes phonologically so distorted as to result in what looks like, and must be described as, a single lexeme; for example, fore castle ended up as fo'c'sle /fokssl/, where only the apostrophes in the spelling hint, albeit rather ineffectually, at an earlier more complex condition.49 A specific phoneme of disjuncture, then, seems superfluous in English phonology because syllabation rules, which can be applied without reference to it, provide a sufficient descriptive statement. Contrasting nitrate and night-rate, Simon and pie man, Haugen thought that night had a slightly more fronted /t/ than nit-, and that man had a slightly delayed /m/ as compared with -mon, and that by these means the otherwise homophonous members of the two pairs were distinguished. This is so — and hesitation and allophonic variation are in fact among the boundary-marking traits I mentioned. But I should add that these boundary markers are optional phonetic events, and occur only if night-rate and pie-man are pronounced as two words rather than as nexus, which they may but need not be: night-rate and nitrate may be, as I said repeatedly, homophonous, and so also Simon and pie-man apart from the initial phoneme. But I agree entirely with Haugen that therefore juncture may be described as "a morphologically determined placement of syllabic timing."50 This, too, says in effect that a statement on syllabation renders unnecessary one on juncture. And the first is more satisfactory because the syllable is a universal, while juncture, in particular disjuncture in the form of internal open juncture, is not; because syllabation is a more substantive and more powerful tool of phonological segmentation 19 The historical grammars of Indo-European languages afford numerous examples of the evolution of words to clitics and thence to bound morphemes, in particular to inflexional affixes; and even if we had no evidence for it, it would be difficult not to surmise that at one time the bound morpheme that appears eventually as, say, the Latin verbal suffix -o, had a more specific and concrete meaning than just the generic signal 'first person singular active', for the simple reason that languages are not designed by linguists or logicians. For examples from the Latin-Romance domain see Pulgram 1963, and 1S67 (Trends), Section 4. 60 Haugen 1949, 280.

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than is juncture; and, finally, because the abandonment of juncture reduces the number of phonemes in the system.51 What is true of two-word nexus and nominal compounds applies equally to longer ones, both in English and in similarly structured NL: wíndshieldwiperblade, Donaudámpfschiffahrtsgesellschaft.52 As long as these items can be demonstrated to have the properties of a single phonological word (e.g., one main stress, medial rather than terminal allophones at the points of lexeme junction, etc.) they are to be syllabized accordingly: /uín-t§il-dua¿-p3--bledz/ (note the assimilation of the /d/ of wind to the /§/ of shield, precisely because they are not separated by a boundary signal; if the lexemes were not in a nexus, one would transcribe /uínd síld/), /do:-naudámpf-sif-fa:rts-ga-sel-saft/. But the compounds can be divided into smaller phonological units, for good reason, and with proper attention to the effects upon syllabation: windshieldwiper blades, possibly windshield wiperblades (but not, because of unsuitable immediate constituent hierarchy, wind shieldwiper blades, or wind shieldwiperblades there being no such thing as a shieldwiper — except perhaps in a mediaeval armory — or a shiéldwiperbladé), Dónau Dámpfschiffahrtsgesellschaft, Donaudámpfschiffahrts Geséllschaft, Dónau Dámpfschiffahrts Geséllschaft, though none of these is used as the official name of the actual Danube Steamship Company, whatever the spelling (but not Dónaudampf Schiffahrtsgesellschaft because 'Danube steam', though it exists, has nothing to do with running ships or a steamship company, or Donaudámpfschiff Fáhrtsgesellschaft because the second of the two nexus is at best a baffling, at worst a meaningless compound, certainly one that has nothing to do with steamship navigation on the Danube).53 61 Haugen 1956, 215: "Some languages have internal open juncture and some [namely, those I call CL and NL, at the point of the nexus seam] do not; but in those that do, there are usually stretches with more than one syllable which do not have junctural division. If we accept juncture as a phoneme ... it still does not account for all the divisions provided by the traditional syllable." " See above, Chapter 2, fn. 9. 6 * Cf. Pilch 1966, 248: "The phenomena known as JUNCTURE turn out to be conditioned by boundaries between constituents. They provide empirical evidence that constituents exist and are linguistically relevant. In ordinary speech relatively few boundaries between constituents are marked, but all

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Of considerable interest is the following problem of disjuncture and syllabation in German. Examination of the lexemes sagbar 'speakable' and biegsam 'flexible' revealed that the g at the end of the first morpheme in both words is regularly voiceless, that the following b and s remain voiced, it was said, if separated from the g by disjuncture, but become voiceless if there is, not disjuncture, but — as it is termed — close juncture; hence the transcriptions are (I am using an acute accent, as before, to mark stress; the plus-sign marks disjuncture): /za:k-f bar/, /za:kpar/, /bi:k+zam/, /bi:ksam/. From this it is concluded: "In German, obstruents (stops, fricatives, sibilants) may stand in close juncture with one another only if all of them are voiceless."54 It seems to me that this condition can be restated more efficiently without reference to juncture, on the basis of phonotactics and syllabation. It will be necessary, however, to examine one item at a time, because, as will be seen, the solutions are not identical. In sagbar a syllable boundary between the two medial consonants is implicit, even if not phonetically signaled by segmental means, since no combination of velar stop plus bilabial stop, in whatever voiced and voiceless combination (Jgb, kp, gp, kb/), can be either an initial or a final cluster in standard German. Accordingly, if /g/ had an obligatory final, and /b/ and obligatory initial allophone, these allophones would have to occur. In fact, /b/ has no such variant; German final /g/ will appear, since the contrast voiced — voiceless stop is neutralized in favor of the voiceless one, as the phoneme /k/. Hence the first syllable of the word is /za:k-/. The next syllable begins with /b/. Consequently, if the syllable boundary is marked by a segmental insertion, the word is syllabized /za:k-bar/ boundaries CAN be marked." Pilch goes on to say that the marking occurs more frequently where phonological and lexical or grammatical boundaries coincide, that its probability increases as one goes up the phonological and grammatical hierarchies. One may mark a boundary for contrast, for example, to distinguish Cuban eyes from cubanize, items which are already distinct because of the stress placement. "These are cases of POTENTIAL DISTINCTION or overdifferentiation." 64 Moulton 1962, 141. (I retain Moulton's opposition of long and short German vowels; another analysis ascribes the emic distinction to the tense-lax opposition. The matter is irrelevant here.)

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[zi:k=bar]. This corresponds to Moulton's first form, except that I write a syllable boundary realized by some segmental signal, where Moulton writes a phoneme of disjuncture. But if there is no segmental syllable boundary marker after the first syllable, although the terminal of the syllable is indicated by the voiceless /k/, then /k/ and /b/ stand in phonetic contiguity, which results in a partial assimilation of the latter to the former, namely, [za:k-bar] (note the familiar arch marking contiguity), with a voiceless-and-lax allophone [b] representing /b/, due to the voiceless-and-tense allophone [k] representing /k/. 65 This no doubt corresponds to Moulton's second form with the /p/ phoneme, so transcribed because it is voiceless, its laxness being disregarded. In other words, instead of Moulton's two phonemic transcriptions, one with and one without a phoneme of juncture, and a concomitant phonemic variation after the disjuncture, I posit but one phonemic transcription /za:k-bar/, with two allophonic possibilities depending on whether the syllable boundary is or is not marked by means of a segmental insertion of some kind, thus: [za:k=bar] or [za:k-1?ar]. (The phonetic nature of [b] is ascertainable with the naked ear, and of course it shows in the spectrogram.) Reference to a juncture phoneme is therefore not necessary. In biegsam the situation is somewhat different since at least some of the four combinations of velar stop plus sibilant are admissible in some phonotactic and syllabic combinations in German, namely, /-ks, ks-, k-z/; all others — /-gz, gz-, g-z, k-s, -gs, gs-, g-s, -kz, kz-/ — are inadmissible. Applying the Rules of syllabation, in particular the one requiring a maximal number of open syllables, to these phonotactic possibilities, biegsam must be /bi:-ksam/ [bi:-ksam]. This corresponds to the second of Moulton's two styles of pronouncing biegsam. Now the only way of arriving at Moulton's first style is not to insist on the openness of the first syllable, which delivers /bi:k-zam/ [bi:k-zam], or, if one causes the two allophones at either side of the syllable boundary to be contiguous, that is, if M

For details on the assimilation at syllable boundaries see above, p. 60. Concerning the voiceless-and-lax, and voiced-and-tense combination of distinctive features see above, Chapter 3, fn. 33.

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s

there is no segmental boundary marker, [bi:k-zam], with the now familiar voiceless-and-lax allophone [z] of /z/, which Moulton transcribes, as he did the [1?] of sagbar, by means of a voiceless /s/, setting aside again the laxness of the allophone — with the result /bi:ksam/.56 But since /bi:k-zam/ [bi:k-zam] or [bi:k-?am] and therefore, I believe, Moulton's /bi:ksam/ are based upon what I should consider an illicit syllabation that closes a syllable which ought for phonotactic reasons to remain open, the question arises whether such pronunciations would actually occur. The only way in which they would is if the speaker wished, for some reason, to emphasize, to dwell upon, the morphological boundary between bieg and sam, of which he is of course aware also without being a linguist. (I have mentioned such a possibility earlier in the syllabation roost-er, if the speaker wishes urgently to convey the notion that he is speaking of an 'animal that roosts'.) But even if that phonetic and morphological result of segmentation may occur, I do not think it should be confused with syllabation; nor is it a phonemic feature that requires special reference to a phoneme of juncture. Moulton himself, like others, is aware of some weakness in the notion of disjuncture, and he seemingly does not feel at ease with it; but he concludes, reluctantly perhaps, that it cannot be dispensed with: "In all the instances of open juncture [disjuncture] discussed in the preceding sections, the one common feature has been that, when two phonemes were in open juncture with one another, there is a clear syllable break between them. If this is the case, one might ask whether we cannot eliminate juncture altogether by analyzing English and German in terms of their syllabic structures. Unfortunately this simple solution cannot be used, because of the cases in which the syllable structure is not clear. As we have seen, the syllable structure of the segment /sf/ is clear neither in " Voiceless-and-lax [f] is, by the way, the regular word-initial allophone of /z/ in many southern German dialects, where standard German has always [z]; hence to a Northerner this [?] sounds more like his own [s] since voicedness and voicelessness are the dominant distinctive features. Of course, true [s] may indeed occur in southern speech word-initially.

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English /dastsfa'nimlk/ that's phonemic nor in German /'dizasfo'ne:m/ dieses Phonem when the words [in my terminology, lexemes] are spoken in close juncture [as nexus]."57 Perhaps I have successfully shown that in the examples sagbar and biegsam the syllable structure can indeed be made clear and that, once this is done, juncture is actually rendered superfluous. But let us now examine also the nexus that's phonemic and dieses Phonem. If their syllable structure and pronunciation can also be stated clearly without recourse to juncture, then Moulton's justified scruples can surely be set aside, and syllabation has in fact rendered juncture superfluous. To begin with, the question to be asked is not whether /sf/ is homosyllabic or heterosyllabic, and, if the former, whether it is coda or onset, but rather (and here the examples skuks and rooster discussed earlier in a different context come to mind) what the distributional status of /sf/ is in a specific item, in accordance with the Rules on syllabation. In English, the phrase that's phonemic, if pronounced as a nexus (with close juncture, as Moulton says), must be syllabized without regard to morpheme and lexeme boundaries. Since the vowel of that cannot be syllable-final, and since moreover /tsf/ cannot be an onset cluster but is a sequence to be divided /t-sf/, the entire nexus is syllabized /5aet-sf3-ni-mlk/. (I continue, diverging from Moulton, to mark the main stress by means of an acute accent over the stressed vowel.) If, on the other hand, that's and phonemic are signaled to be two phonological words — which, in the absence of identifiable terminal allophones of either the final /s/ or the initial /f/, must be accomplished by the insertion of a segmental signal, (observe that one cannot rely on stress signals either, because secondary-plus-primary stress in the nexus may be acoustically no different from primary-plus-primary stress on the two words) — the syllabation must be /Ssets fo-ni-mlk/. In the absence of such an inserted signal (silence or, in German, mostly a glottal stop) there may be no phonetic difference between the nexus and the " Moulton 1962,143. Observe that I should assign but one main stress to the nexus dieses Phonem (on the last syllable), not two, as does Moulton.

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121

•— two-word pronunciation: [d£t-sf3-ni:-mlk] and [dsets fa-nii-mlk] (with the arches at syllable and, in the second phrase, at word boundaries indicating phonetic contiguity of the phones without intervening segmental signal). In the German phrase dieses Phonem, one either is faced with a nexus or two words, either /di-za-sfo-n&m/ or /di-zas fo-ne:m/. But, again, only an inserted segmental signal between the two words will phonetically distinguish the second from the first; otherwise [di-za-sfo-ne:m] and [di-zas fo-ne:m] may be homophonous.58 And exactly the same phonemic and phonetic rules apply to the pair that sphericity and that's phericity.59 Moulton also requires a phoneme of disjuncture between the lexemes in cases like pen-knife and cannot, for without it the rule that in English "no consonant may follow itself in close juncture" 60 (which is tantamount to saying that English has no phonemically long, or geminate, consonants) would be broken. But once more one may, I think, instead of operating with disjuncture, have recourse to syllabation of phonetic geminates in a language that has no phonemic geminates (see above, p. 110, on wholly, mock-king, filling, etc.). Hence one transcribes and syllabizes /pen-aif/ and /kaen-ot/ (with closed syllables because /e/ and / s / are checked vowels), realized as [pen=najf] and [kaen=not] with the lexeme /

N

boundaries showing, as it were, or [pen-naif] and [ksen-not] without lexeme boundaries (no terminal allophones for /n/ are available). 68

I have assumed, as I assuredly may, that in the nexus pronunciations

[8sfet-sfo-ni:-mIk] and [di-z3-sfo-ne:m] no speaker will choose to insert a segmental syllable boundary marker where I have put the connecting arches, because he would in fact be tearing apart what he knows to be lexemes. Yet allophones, whose articulation is not subject to the conscious control of the speaker, are articulated in accordance with syllabation rules. For example, in the nexus Pike's Peak /pajk-spik/ (the name of a mountain), the /p/ of Peak will be pronounced, in general American English, not as an initial aspirated [p11] as in postpausal or word-initial peak [p"i:k], but as a non-initial, nonaspirated, post-/s/ [p] as in speak [spi:k] — hence [pajk-spi:k] (but never [pajk=spi:k] with an inserted segmental boundary marker, which would be heard as Pike, speak; nor is a two-word pronunciation, [pajks pi:k], likely). 69 Cited by Moulton 1962, 139. Moulton 1962, 141.

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O f these two items, pen-knife is not likely to be two words, but invariably a nexus; cannot on the other hand, though never spelled can not, may be conceived by the speaker and heard by the listener as two words, /kaen not/, realized as [keen not], with the word boundary signaled, in the absence of terminal allophones, by segmental means, resulting homophonous with [kaen=not] if the syllable boundary is signaled by identical segmental means. Also the question whether the two German fricatives — the palatal as in riechen [riigan] 'to smell', Rechen [regan] 'rake', and the velar as in Rdchen [ra:xan] 'throat', Rochen [roxan] 'ray' (zool.), Geruch [goru:x] 'odor' — should be accounted for as one or two phonemes, may be amenable to a syllabic solution. There would in fact be no problem if the usage followed regularly my examples, namely, front vowels being followed by [9], back vowels by [x], the two therefore being positional allophones of a single phoneme /X/. But cases like Mamachen [mama^on] 'little mama', Flohchen [flo:gan] 'little flee', Kuhchen [kurgan] 'little cow', with [5] after back vowels, seem to require the positing of two phonemes, /$/ and /x/.61 The number of lexemes having back vowel plus [9] is small, however, and they are all of them compounds of a noun with the diminutive suffix [gan]. Hence some linguists thought it economical in phonemic analysis to account for [9] in this position on morphological grounds by inserting a juncture between noun stem and chen, which permitted the postjunctural fricative to be realized in its postpausal allophone, which is [9]: so they analyzed Kuhchen /ku:+Xan/ [ku:+gan]. 6 2 But in the frequent instances where this disjuncture is not phonetically realized as such, the only testimony to its phonemic presence is the shape of the fricative: [kiirgon] must be /ku:+Xan/ Kuhchen, but [kii:xon] must be /ku:Xan/ Kuchen 'cake'. 63 This, however, raises the legitimate question 61

So already Bloomfield 1933,101; and more recently Moulton 1962, 27, 30. So for example Moulton 1947, 214, 218, 223. Leopold 1948, 179, objects to this analysis: "To say that /x/ shows the allophone [9] after open juncture in its zero form, means that there is no observable sign of open juncture. It amounts to saying that we must assume open juncture when /x/ shows the allophone [9]. This is a vicious circle." Not really — for [9] can be as much a manifestation of some phonemic condition, whatever it may be called, as is silence. "

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123

whether anything is gained in convenience and economy of description by excluding the phonemic contrast /x/ versus /?/ if it can be achieved only by adding the phoneme /+/ — which has been proved superfluous in other circumstances. The most desirable description would be one that has but one fricative phoneme, and no phoneme of disjuncture. I should therefore suggest that if /ku:Xan/, syllabized /ku:-Xan/, is realized with [x], the syllable boundary is segmentally unsignaled so that [u:] and [x], though on either side of a syllable boundary, are phonetically contiguous, with the velar fricative determined (by a kind of assimilation, if one wishes) by the preceding back vowel: [ku:-x9n] Kitchen; if instead the [5] occurs, the syllable boundary is signaled by a segmental insertion, with the palatal fricative being determined by its postpausal position: [ku:=gan] Kuhchen. The speaker may wish to signal this latter syllable boundary so as to render audible the occurrence in that spot of a morphological boundary (of which he is of course aware because of the specific diminutive meaning of the suffix cheri), possibly because he wants to be certain that his listener understands Kuh-chen and not Kitchen.** Yet since it is certain that the signaling by means of a segmental insertion of the syllable boundary between [u:] and [9] is optional, it is implied that the phones may in fact be in contiguity also in the case of Kuhchen /kui-Xan/, namely, [ku:-xan] with the inevitable [x] after a back vowel, which is r—\

homophonous with [ku:-xan] Kuchen; and conversely, it is implied that the syllable boundary in Kuchen /ku:-Xan/ may be signaled by a segmental insertion, namely [kii:=gan] with the inevitable postpausal [5]. But this would mean that Kuhchen and Kuchen may, " I do not deny that for heuristic purposes the phonological analyst is entitled to seek clues on levels other than the phonological (indeed in practice he will do so, though perhaps apologetically pleading a procedural 'shortcut'); but I do not believe that a reference to morphology should be part of a descriptive phonological statement. I therefore choose to describe this phonological situation by reference to the syllable, which is a phonological unit, and let morphological facts be incidental to it: that the first is used by the speaker and understood by the listener on the level of the second is irrelevant to the description.

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under certain conditions of syllabation and syllable boundary signaling, be homophonous — and indeed I should maintain that occasionally they are. Judging by my own habit and experience, however, I believe that Kuhchen, Mamachen, Flohchen, etc. are more likely to be pronounced with [x], than are Kuchen, Rachen, Rochen, etc. with [5]. I suggest that this is so because there will scarcely arise a necessity for insisting on audibly, by means of an inserted segment, syllabizing the items Kuchen, Rachen, Rochen, etc., whereas the habit or desire (never the necessity) to make audible for morphological reasons the syllable boundary in Kuhchen, Mamachen, Flohchen, etc. can be laid aside without danger to the clarity of the message as long as the context precludes ambiguity, as quite regularly it will: there is hardly a chance that Kuhchen and Kuchen will occur exchangeably in a context (except one made by linguists, where, in any event, though the verbal context in a single phrase seems to prove a point, the larger context of discourse and situation is lacking).65

66 The very recent book on internal juncture by Gaarding 1967,1 could not see before finishing my manuscript. But judging from the publisher's announcement, it defines internal juncture as a marked syllable boundary in a phrase — which seems to be quite near my own view.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABBREVIATIONS AL BF FL IBK IF JASA JL MP NT PICL PICPS PMLA SL ZP ZPAS ZPSK

Acta Linguistica Boletim de filologia Foundations of Language Insbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft Indogermanische Forschungen Journal of the Acoustic Society of America Journal of Linguistics Maître Phonétique Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap Proceedings of the International Congress of Linguists Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences Publications of the Modern Language Association Studia Linguistica Zeitschrift für Phonetik Zeitschrift für Phonetik und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprach- und Kommunikationsforschung

Note: The dates given for PICL and PICPS are those of publication, not of the Congress. Works by the same author are listed in order of their publication dates. See also the NOTE at the end of footnote 1, above, p. 11. WORKS CITED Agard, Frederick B., and Robert J. Di Pietro, The sounds of English and Italian (Chicago 1965). Allen, William Sidney, Sandhi. The theoretical, phonetic, and historical bases of word-junction in Sanskrit (The Hague 1962). Anderson, James M., "The demarcative function", Lingua 13 (1965) 185-188. Antonsen, Elmer H., "Suprasegmentals in German", Language 42 (1966) 587-601.

126

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, J. F., "A phonological approach to vowel, consonant and syllable in Modern French", Lingua 5 (1955/56) 253-287. Bloomfield, Leonard, Language (New York 1933). Brekle, Herbert E., "Syntaktische Gruppe (Adjectiv + Substantiv) vs. Komposition im modernen Englisch: Versuch einer Deutung auf Klassen- und relationslogischer Basis", Linguistics 23 (1966) 5-29. Carroll, John B., "The assessment of phoneme cluster frequencies", Language 34 (1958) 267-278. Chatman, Seymour, A theory of meter (The Hague 1965). Cherry, E. Colin, "Roman Jakobson's 'distinctive features' as the normal coordinates of a language", For Roman Jakobson, ed. by Morris Halle et al. (The Hague 1956), 60-64. Chomsky, Noam, and George A. Miller, "Introduction to the formal analysis of natural languages", Handbook of mathematical psychology, ed. by R. Duncan Luce et al. (New York 1963), Vol. 2, chapter 11, 269-321. Delattre, Pierre, "Tendances de coupe syllabique en français", PMLA 55 (1940) 579-595. Durand, Marguerite, "La syllabe: ses définitions, sa nature", Orbis 3 (1954) 527-533. Enkvist, Nils Erik, Discussion (of paper by Arthur N. Stowe, "Segmentation of natural speech into syllables by acoustic phonetic means"), PICL 9 (The Hague 1964), 899. Fay, Warren H., Temporal sequence in the perception of speech (The Hague 1966). Fischer-Jargensen, Eli, "On the definition of phoneme categories on a distributional basis", AL 7 (1952) 8-39. Fliflet, Albert L., "Einige Beobachtungen über Anschluss und Silbe", PICPS 4 (1962) 610-615. , "Syllable type and syllable perception", Phonetica 10 (1963) 187-193. Fodale, Peter, "Sicilian dialects as a diasystem: a study in structural dialectology" (Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1964). Gaarding, Eva, Internal juncture in Swedish (Lund 1967). Galton, Herbert, "The fixation of accent in Latin and Greek", ZP 15 (1962) 273-299. Hàla, Bohuslav, "La syllabe: sa nature, son origine et ses transformations", Orbis 10 (1961) 69-143. Hall, Robert A., Jr., Descriptive Italian grammar (Ithaca 1948). , Italian for modern living (Ithaca 1958). , Initial consonants and syntactic doubling in West Romance, Language 40 (1964) 551-556. Haugen, Einar, "Phoneme or prosodeme?", Language 25 (1949) 278-282. , "The syllable in linguistic description", For Roman Jakobson, ed. by Morris Halle et al. (The Hague 1956), 213-221. Hermann, Eduard, Silbenbildung im Griechischen und in den anderen indogermanischen Sprachen (Göttingen 1923). Hoard, J. E., "Juncture and syllable structure in English", Phonetica 15 (1966) 96-109. Hockett, Charles F., Manual of phonology (Baltimore 1955).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

127

, "Sound change", Language 41 (1965) 185-204. Jakobson, Roman, Kindersprache, Aphasie, und allgemeine Lautgesetze (Uppsala 1941). Jensen, Martin Kloster, "Die Silbe in der Phonetik und Phonemik", Phonetica 9 (1963) 17-38. Jones, Daniel, "The word as a phonetic entity", MP 36 (1931) 60-65. Kim, Tai Whan, "Description and history of consonant groups from Latin to Italian" (Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1965). Kohler, K. J., "Is the syllable a phonetic universal?", JL 2 (1966) 207-208. Koschmieder, Erwin, "Zur Silbentheorie", IF 60 (1952) 282-299. Kuöera, Henry, The phonology of Czech (The Hague 1961). Kurath, Hans, A phonology and prosody of Modern English (Heidelberg 1964). Ladefoged, Peter, "Sub-glottal activity during speech", PICPS 4 (1962) 73-91. Lebrun, Yvan, "Sur la syllabe, sommet de sonorité", Phonetica 14 (1966) 1-15. Lees, Robert B., The grammar of English nominalizations (2nd ed., The Hague 1963). Lehiste, Ilse, An acoustic-phonetic study of internal open juncture (Suppl. to Vol. 5 of Phonetica, Basel 1960). , "Acoustic studies of boundary signals", PICPS 4 (1962) 178-187. , "Juncture", PICPS 5 (1965) 172-200. Lejeune, Michel, Traité de phonétique grecque (2nd ed., Paris 1955). Leopold, Werner F., "German ch", Language 24 (1948) 179-180. Lieberman, Philip, Intonation, perception, and language (Cambridge, Mass. 1967). Lisker, Leigh, "Linguistic segments, acoustic segments, and synthetic speech", Language 33 (1957) 370-374. Malmberg, Bertil, Le système consonantique du français contemporain (Lund 1943). , "La coupe syllabique dans le système consonantique du français", AL 4 (1944) 61-66. , "Note sur les groupes de consonnes en espagnol", ZPAS 21 (1948) 239-255. , "La structure syllabique de l'espagnol: étude de phonétique", BF9 (1948) 99-120. , "The phonetic basis for syllable division", SL 9 (1955) 80-87. , "La notion de 'force' dans les changements phonétiques", SL 16 (1962) 38-44. , "La structure phonétique de quelques langues romanes", Orbis 11 (1962) 131-178. , "Voyelle, consonne, syllabe, mot", Homenaje ... Martinet, ed. by Diego Catalán (La Laguna 1962) 3.81-97. , "Gémination, force et structure syllabique en latin et en roman", Études ... Blinkenberg, ed. by P. Nykrog and H. Sörensen (Copenhagen 1963) 106-112. , Phonetics (New York 1963). , Structural linguistics and human communication. An introduction into the mechanism of language and the methodology of linguistics (Berlin 1963).

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, "Note sur la structure syllabique de l'espagnol mexicain", ZPSK 17 (1964) 251-255. , "Stability and instability of syllabic structures", P1CPS 5 (1965) 403-408. Martinet, André, "Langues à syllabes ouvertes: le cas du slave commun", ZPAS 6 (1952) 145-163. , Économie des changements phonétiques. Traité de phonologie diachronique (Berne 1955). , Elements of general linguistics (Chicago 1964). , "De la morphonologie", La Linguistique 1965, 1.15-30. Miller, George A., "Speech and communication", JASA 30 (1958) 397-398. Moulton, William G., "Juncture in modem standard German", Language 23 (1947) 212-226. , The sounds of English and German (Chicago 1962). O'Connor, J. D., and J. L. M. Trim, "Vowel, consonant, and syllable — a phonological definition", Word 9 (1953) 103-122. Pike, Kenneth L., "Operational phonemics in reference to linguistic relativity", JASA 24 (1952) 618-625. Pilch, Herbert, Phonemtheorie, Teil I (Basel 1964). , "Phonemic constituent analysis", Phonetica 14 (1966) 237-252. Postal, Paul M., Review of Martinet 1964, FL 2 (1966) 151-186. Pulgram, Ernst, "French /a/: statics and dynamics of linguistic subcodes", Lingua 10 (1961) 302-325. , "Phonetics and sound change", PICPS 4 (1962) 731-734. , "Synthetic and analytic morphological constructs", IBK 1963, 35-42. , "Consonant cluster, consonant sequence, and the syllable", Phonetica 13 (1965) 76-81. , "Graphic and phonic systems : figurae and signs", Word 21 (1965)208-224. , "Prosodie systems: French", Lingua 13 (1965) 125-144. , "Sciences, humanities, and the place of linguistics", Research: definitions and reflections: Essays on the occasion of The University of Michigan Sesquicentennial, ed. by Donald E. Thackrey (Ann Arbor 1967) 67-95. , "Trends and predictions", To Honor Roman Jakobson (The Hague 1967). Romeo, Luigi, "On the phonemic status of the so-called 'geminates' in Italian", Linguistics 29 (1967) 105-116. Saporta, Sol, "Frequency of consonant clusters", Language 31 (1955) 25-31. , and Donald Olson, "Classification of intervocalic clusters", Language 34 (1958) 261-266. Saumjan, S., "Die Zweistufentheorie der Phonologie im Licht der modernen Wissenschaft", Phonetica 16 (1967) 121-142. Sommerfelt, Alf, "Can syllable division have phonological importance?", PICPS 2 (1936) 30-33. , Diachronic and synchronic aspects of language (The Hague 1962). Stetson, R. H., Motor phonetics: a study of speech movements in action (2nd ed., Amsterdam 1951). Stockwell, Robert P., J. Donald Bowen, and I. Silva Fuenzalida, "Spanish juncture and intonation", Language 32 (1956) 641-665. Teeter, Karl V., "A note on uniqueness", Language 42 (1966) 475-478.

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129

Trager, George L., and Henry Lee Smith, Jr., An outline of English structure (Norman, Okla. 1951). Trim, John L. M., "The identification of phonological units", PICPS 4 (1962) 773-778. Twaddell, W. Freeman, "Stetson's model and the 'suprasegmental' phonemes", Language 29 (1953) 415-453. Valencia, Pablo, A note on the syllable (Unpublished seminar report, University of Michigan, 1965). , "An historical study of syllabic structure in Spanish" (Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1966). Vogt, Hans, "The structure of the Norwegian monosyllables", NT 12 (1942) 5-29. , "Phoneme classes and phoneme classification", Word 10 (1954) 28-38. Weinrich, Harald, Phonologische Studien zur romanischen Sprachgeschichte (Münster 1958). , "Phonologie der Sprechpause", Phonetica 7 (1961) 4-18. Winter, Werner, "Transforms without kernels?", Language 41 (1965) 484-489. Zipf, George K., Human behavior and the principle of least effort (Cambridge, Mass. 1949).

INDEX OF AUTHORS CITED

Agard - DiPietro, 44 Allen, 73 Anderson, 70 Antonsen, 26 Arnold, 41, 42, 82 Bloomfield, 122 Brekle, 29 Carroll, 79 Chatman, 26 Cherry, 15 Chomsky - Miller, 86 Delattre, 18 Durand, 12, 17, 19 Enkvist, 20 Fay, 15 Fisher - Jargensen, 41, 43, 99 Fliflet, 50, 51, 101 Fodale, 106 Gaarding, 124 Galton, 36 Hdla, 12 Hall, 72, 106, 107 Haugen, 13, 18, 40, 41, 115, 116 Hermann, 112 Hoard, 111 Hockett, 48, 86 Jakobson, 67 Jensen, 18 Jones, 27

Karttunen, F., 101, 103 Karttunen, L., 100, 103 Kohler, 11 Koschmieder, 19 Kuiera, 41, 82, 83 Kurath, 74, 76, 113 Ladefoged, 17 Lebrun, 11 Lees, 29 Lehiste, 25, 48, 101, 103, 110, 113 Lejeune, 69 Leopold, 122 Lieberman, 26, 57 Lisker, 15 Malmberg, 17, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 75, 110 Martinet, 28, 68, 69, 71 Miller, 57, 86 Moulton, 117, 120, 121, 122 O'Connor - Trim, 41, 42, 82, 83, 93 Pike, 15 Pilch, 15, 116 Postal, 21 Pulgram, 13, 21, 23, 27, 35,47, 51, 56, 68, 69, 77, 78, 79, 92, 100, 101,104, 115 Romeo, 105 Saporta, 79 Saporta - Olson, 40, 93, 94, 95, 97, 99 Saumjan, 38, 39

INDEX OF AUTHORS CITED

Sivertsen, 23 Sommerfelt, 89 Stetson, 17, 19 Stockwell - Bowen - Fuenzalida, 92 Teeter, 75 Trager - Smith, 28, 29 Trim, 17 Twaddell, 81

Valencia, 20,51,70,71, 80, 81,98 Vogt, 79, 94 Weinrich, 20, 30, 64, 88, 107 Winter, 91, 92 Zipf, 72

131