Syllable Structure

How do we put together our syllables? Where do the consonants and vowels go inside our words? This week on The Ling Space, we talk about syllable structure: how we fit the sounds together, how we decide what consonants go where, and how we know what makes words rhyme.

This is Topic #14!

This week's tag language: Kapampangan!

Find us on all the social media worlds:
Twitter: @TheLingSpace

We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.

Looking forward to next week!

[RealDubstepTunes]

Thanks a lot for this video. As I'm studying linguistics (english) right now, this is very helpful! Keep up the good work!

[paulinaespina]

Korra references!!! I am smiling so hard right now :) You explain very clearly, btw. Thank you for everything <3

[thelingspace]

Sifaw II Thanks for the comment! The dialect we were drawing on was Tashlhiyt Berber. There's a paper on this topic by Rachid Ridouane in 2008 in the journal Phonology. According to Ridouane, who worked with a number of different speakers of Tashlhiyt, there are words (like [fqqs]) which have no vowels in them, either phonetically or phonologically, in that dialect, and he uses a number of methods to back that up.

That said, Ridouane also notes that different dialects of Berber vary in this regard, so we maybe should have been more specific when we said it in the video. ^_^

[bonbonpony]

There's one more reasons for the restrictions of the coda: There can be another syllable just next to it, from the same word, or form another word, and it may be confused with it, unless we introduce some stricter rules about which sounds can be in the coda. This facilitates separating words from continuous stream of sounds in speech.

[thelingspace]

+Seth Thompson Thanks for the question! This is actually a really interesting question about different languages. While there are a good number of languages that require onsets, there aren't any languages that require codas. Some languages forbid them, and some languages restrict them to a subset of what consonants exist in the language. But there's no language that requires a coda to be in a syllable for the syllable to be acceptable. This could be for phonological reasons (e.g. codas are weaker positionally than onsets / we have a constraint that mediates against coda use) or phonetic ones (e.g. codas are harder to hear or differentiate between), but whatever lies underneath, typologically, it's the same: no language requires codas. Hope this helps! ^_^

[JakubSzymanik]

Thanks! Great video as always. What's the reference for explaining the fact that onsets are greedy and will steal consonants?

[xvkarbear]

thumbed you up mostly for the legend of korra and avatar the last air bender references - including your shirt! ;)

[muhannedbennana]

I am a Berber native speaker. I am not sure from which dialect you brought the world 'fqqs', however, in pronunciation it would be "fɛqqəs'

[ランカスターリナ]

I feel like you're specifically teaching to me. I'm a giant Avatar fan and a Linguistics major!

[brianmcdermott]

Thanks for the great videos! They are very insightful.

[thelingspace]

+Ava M. Glad you've found it useful! And the whole colour and visual design is thanks to our graphics team, atelierMuse - they really do a lot for us. I'll pass that comment on to them. ^_^

[sC-vkxi]

It was funny to hear all the Avatar references, and I love your shirt :)

Found this channel through your video about Arrival (which I saw today), even though I hardly understand the stuff I will subscribe haha

[DerekRodenbeck]

I love your videos. Thank you for all the help!

[KSunny]

A struggling ling major student here. Btw, is that a figurine of Kanji Tatsumi from Persona4 behind you? Awesome!

[yeonjungmoon]

Thanks a lot! I am Korean learning linguistic! It's so helpful to prepare final exams! I recommended my friends to see this video:) How about using Korean language examples in your video? Maybe me and my friends like a lot! :)

[katiesmith]

It didn't take me long to get the avatar references, but man it took me the whole video to realize what shirt you were wearing lol

[Tixmeeoff]

I, too, found this video quite useful. It can be diffictult to understand some topics without demonstration.

[francescaluciablancosalvad]

It would be very helpful if you could explain in one of you future videos the phonological processes :)

[teacherdkennedy]

So, both l, m and n have kind of little schwas attached to them. How do linguists decide if it is a schwa or just the vowelly part of l? I always tell my students (some of whom want to put in an e or a in, say, spoil (spoyal). I tell the the /eh/ part is just that you mouth can't get back to l fast enough so it sort of adds a little vowel. For the consonant-le syllables, I tell them they work backwards, as if it were consonant-el

[guspolly]

Of course you start right off with two words that (to me, characteristically) don't rhyme in my accent where they do in standard English. My "fire" is [fʌɪɚ] but my "higher" is [haɪɚ].