Re: English syllable structure
| From: | Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, December 5, 2001, 16:25 |
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At 8:32 AM -0500 12/05/01, John Cowan wrote:
>Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>
>>For
>>example, tense vowels and diphthongs don't occur with non-alveolar
>>consonant clusters.
>
>
>Since English has only /b p m k g N/ as non-alveolar consonants,
>and (AFAIK) only /mp Nk Ng/ as non-alveolar clusters, this seems
>a kind of trivial observation. Anyhow, the rule applies to /N/
>by itself as well.
I'm not sure why this observation would be "trivial"; it is a real
generalization about English syllable structure. The point was that
simply combining all possible syllabic nuclei with all possible
onsets and codas vastly overpredicts the number of possible syllables
in English. Taking into account phonotactic restrictions such as the
one under discussion will prune back that number considerably.
Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu
"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead;
therefore we must learn both arts."
- Thomas Carlyle
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