Re: USAGE: syllables

Quoting Ian Spackman <ianspackman@...>:

> The whole matter of syllables can get very messy - there's the matter
> of
> for what purpose, at the very least.  The syllables they taught me in
> elementary school were a matter of where to place the hyphen when a word
> is
> split over a line break.
Thanks to this kind of teaching, I for years believed that syllables were a
feature of written language, not of spoken.

> To confuse matters further, I recall that Roger Lass found it convenient
> to
> invoke ambisyllabicity to describe English at some point (though I
> cant
> quite recall why).
Because you get words like "happy" - to which syllable does the [p] belong? It
should, by the principle of maximal onsets, clearly belong to the second. But
English don't allow lax vowels, like the /&/ in the first syllable of "happy",
to end a syllable, so it clearly can't be /h&.pi/ either. Finding ourselves in
a bit of a bind, we invoke ambisyllabicity and declare that the [p] belongs to
both.

Another, more or less equivalent, solution is to say that "happy" is
underlyingly /h&ppi/ with a geminate, and that a surface phonological rule
reduces the geminate to a single stop in pronunciation. This however does not
give us the opportunity to use the wonderfully heptasyllabic
word "ambisyllabicity".

                                                          Andreas