Makalah English Department STKIP BARUS TAPANULI TANGAH

1. Phonological Construction
By :
Jerusman Marbun
Grade :
Semester IV ( Four )
Department :
Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris
Course Title/ Subject :
Phonology
Lecturer :
Subono Hutagalung, S.Pd
SEKOLAH TINGGI KEGURUAN DAN ILMU PENDIDIKAN
( STKIP ) BARUS TAPANULI TENGAH
T.A 2013/2014

2. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Pages
FREFACE ............................................................................................................... i
BACKGROUND ....................................................................................................ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ...................................................................................... iii
CHAPTER I
A. Cognitive Phonology .................................................................................. 1
Introduction ................................................................................................ 1
Knowledge of Linguistic Sound ............................................................. 2-5
CHAPTER II
B. Phonological Constructions ....................................................................... 6
Groups of Sound ..................................................................................... 6-9
The Internal Structure of Syllable ............................................................ 10
CHAPTER III
C. The Role Of Abstraction In Constructing Phonological Structure ...........11
The Origins Of Syllable Structure ............................................................11
Cross Linguistic Variation In Subsyllabic ............................................... 12
Subsyllabic Structure In Korean And Japanese ....................................... 12
CHAPTER IV
D. Phonology III: Syllable Structure, Stress ................................................. 13
Syllable Structure ( Universal ) ................................................................ 13
Vowels Are Nuclear ( English ) .......................................................... 14-16
Syllable Structure II ............................................................................ 16-17
Stress ................................................................................................... 18-22
CONCLUSION
SUGGESTION
REFERENCES
iii

3. PREFACE
Praise be to the God, The cherisher and sustainer of the worlds; God who
has been giving His blessing and mercy to the writer to complete the paper
entitled “PHONOLOGY” This paper is submitted to fullfil one of the
requirements to gain college degree of English Study Faculty in STKIP – BARUS
TAPANULI TENGAH
In finishing this paper, the writer really gives his regards and thanks for
people who has given guidance and help the writer to finish this paper.
Finally, the writer realizes there are unintended errors in writing this paper.
He really allows all readers to give their suggestion to improve its content in order
to be made as one of the good examples for the next paper.
Barus, April 2014
Writer,
i

4. BACKGROUND
This paper is arranged to introductory on Phonological Construction of
the sort taught in the first year of The English Language. The students on such
courses can struggle with phonetics and phonology ; it is sometimes difficult to
see past the new symbols and terminology, and the apparent assumption that we
can immediately become consciously aware of movements of the vocal organs
which we have been making almost automatically for the last eighteen or more
years. This paper attempts to show us why we need to know about phonetics and
phonology, if we are interested in language and our knowledge of it, as well as
introducing the main units and concepts we require to describe speech sounds
accurately.
When it’s arranged to presenting the details of phonology, I have also
chosen to use verbal descriptions rather than diagrams and pictures in most cases.
The reason for this is we need to learn to use our own intuitions, and this is helped
by encouraging us to introspect and think about our own vocal organs, rather than
seeing disembodied pictures of structures which don’t seem to belong to them at
all.
Our hope is that a through grounding in the basics will help us approach
more abstract theoretical and met theoretical issues in more advanced courses with
greater understanding of what the theories intend to do and to achieve, and with
more chance of evaluating competing models realistically.
ii

5. CHAPTER 1
A. Cognitive Phonology
1. Introduction
Phonology is usually thought of as the study of the ‘sound systems’ of
languages. In this article the writer will make an attempt to explain what that
means for mean why the writer refer to the approach that the writer favor as
‘cognitive’. Frankly, the writer have no idea how phonology could ever be
anything but cognitive. However, there is a certain view that explanation in this
domain must be crucially built upon our understanding of how sounds are
produced and perceived. The writer do not dispute that insight into linguistic
sound systems can be derived from such understanding. My point is that some
fundamental properties of sound systems cannot be understood in this way, but
rather must come from theories about the cognitive representations that underlie
sound systems. Hence ‘cognitive phonology’. As we will see, phonology, being
cognitive, is not fully encapsulated in the mind, as there must also be a system for
externalizing the phonological representations.
In section 2 the writer first discuss what it means to say someone knows
linguistic sound events. Section 3 argues for a strong parallelism between
grammatical components (phonology, syntax and semantics) and contains a brief
excursion on the evolution of language. Sections 4 and 5 home in on the
phonological component, discussing static (i.e. phonotactic) and dynamic (i.e.
allomorphy) phenomena, respectively. In section 6, the writer argue that even
though the phonological system is non-derivational and constraint-based, two
levels (in different planes) are necessary. Section 7 offers some conclusions.
This article can be read as an attempt on my part to explain to interested
parties (linguists who are not, or not primarily, phonologists, scholars in other
fields, colleagues, friends, relatives) what it is that the writer studying and why the
writer hold certain beliefs or guiding ideas about this subject. Hence the writer do
not presuppose much prior knowledge of phonology, although the exposition
becomes increasingly more involved and complex, all of which, the writer hope is
not offending Hans den Besten, to whom the writer offer this article as a token of
both my esteem for him as a linguist as well as my friendship as a colleague.
1

6. 2. Knowledge of linguistic sounds
Humans do not appear to be very good at communicating telepathically,
i.e. by reading the thoughts in each other’s minds. To travel from one mind to the
other, thoughts need carriers that are perceptible. Most human languages make use
of carriers that are audible, although communication (taken as a broader concept)
also uses a great deal of visual information, notably in the gestures and ‘body
languages’ that humans display when they express their thoughts. In addition, sign
languages, as used in Deaf communities, are human languages that are totally
based on visual forms.
Other sensory channels (smell, taste and touch) play a much smaller role in
human communication (while being quite significant among other animal
species), although tactile communication can reach quite sophisticated levels,
even as an alternative to spoken or signed language. (See Finnegan 2002 for a
comprehensive overview of the different channels of communication.) I will
confine the discussion here to that part of communicative acts that is taken care of
by spoken language. Human languages, then, contain an inventory of ‘sound
events’ that are conventionally(and largely arbitrarily) linked to ‘meanings’ or
‘concepts’ that constitute the building blocks out of which we construct our
thoughts.
By stringing these sound events together we construct complex words and
sentences that represent our hidden thoughts. If the listener knows the
conventional linkage between sound events and their meanings, as well as the
grammatical rules for decomposing complex expressions that encode the complex
thoughts of the speaker, communication can proceed successfully. What does it
mean to say that the language user knows the sound events that are linked to
meanings? Clearly, sound events as such (i.e. as physical acoustic events) do not
form part of cognition. There is no part of the brain that literally contains an
inventory of acoustic events that somehow can be released upon command.
Rather, human produce sounds every time they speak. Sounds are produced by
specific actions or movements of certain body parts. How this works in detail is
studied under the heading of ‘articulatory phonetics’. Speakers apparently know
these specific movements (as appropriate for achieving certain acoustic targets)
and it might therefore be assumed that it is this (largely unconscious) knowledge
(rather than the sounds themselves) that forms part of human cognition. But this
cannot be enough.
2

7. Language users do not recognize sounds by visually identifying the
movements that produce them(although such visual information is used in speech
recognition when available). If ‘speech’ recognition was totally based on the
visual perception of articulatory movements, spoken languages would be sign
languages! Rather they identify the sounds as such (which is why can talk over the
telephone or listen to the radio). In other words, language users have a mental,
perceptual (i.e. a psycho-acoustic) image of the sounds that allows them to parse
the acoustic speech signal into units that can be matched with words or
meaningful parts of complex words. It would seem, then, that knowledge of sound
events has two aspects, an articulatory plan and a perceptual or psycho-acoustic
image. It is a widely accepted view that the knowledge of sound events that
correspond to morphemes and words is quite specific, in that it takes the form of a
mental representation that is compositional (rather than holistic). This means that
the cognitive representation is built out of smaller parts or ‘atoms’ that are in
themselves meaningless.
At one time it was believed that the atoms corresponded roughly to
complete slices of the acoustic signal and the atoms were thus called
phonemes(since X-emes are fundamental units in the component that deals with
X). Subsequent research revealed, however, that phonemes themselves consist of
smaller parts, and these were called features.
There has been a long debate on the question as to whether the articulatory
aspects or the perceptual aspects of features are more fundamental. For a revealing
discussion, I refer to Fowler and Galantucci (2002). In their view, the articulatory
plan is fundamental. The articulatory basis of features is also clearly present in
most work on feature theory since Chomsky and Halle (1968), especially in its
‘feature geometric’ descendants (cf. Halle 1983, 2003). A consequence of taking
articulation as basic is that in speech perception, listeners must be assumed to
crucially draw on their articulatory knowledge. The idea is that perceived stimuli
are internally linked to the corresponding articulatory plan which then can be
matched with the articulatory - based phonological form of lexical items. This
proposal is known as the ‘motor theory of speech perception’ advocated by
Liberman and Mattingly (1985). (Ina way, it is claimed then that hearers mentally
‘see’ the articulatory movements that underlie the acoustic events.) This theory
forms the basis of the “articulatory phonology” model (cf. Browman & Goldstein
1986).
3

8. Others (among them, Roman Jakobson) believe that the perceptual image
is fundamental, mainly because of its presumed close relationship to the acoustic
aspect of sounds, which is shared by speaker (through feedback) and listener. See
Harris (1994) as well as Anderson and Ewen (1987) for a defense of this position.
I will not enter into this debate here, and keep a neutral stand on the issue, in that I
will assume that the cognitive representation of sounds simply has two layers, an
articulatory plan and a perceptual image. In fact, my own views on the true atoms
of phonology involves the postulation of just two units which can hardly be said
to have any phonetic definition, articulatory or perceptual. (See van der Hulst
2000, in press d, in prep a.)
In any event, it seems safe to conclude that knowledge of sound events
involves compositional mental representations of these events, and that makes the
‘sound side’ of linguistic signs as abstract and cognitive as the meaning side. Just
like (word) meaning can be thought of in terms of concepts that stand in some
relationship to real world objects, phonology must also be understood as a
conceptual system that stands in somesort of relationship to real world objects
(namely certain types of noises, or certain types of behavior, i.e. articulatory
behavior); see van der Hulst (in press b) for a more detailed discussion. But wait,
says the philosopher. We know that not all word meanings or concepts that
constitute them correspond to something in the real world. And I was hoping that
he would say that because if he is right (and I think we all agree that he is,
although the case can more easily be made for compositional conceptual
structures than for the ‘atomic’ concepts), then there is no reason to assume that
all phonological concepts stand in a direct referential relationship to some real
world noise or behavior. I will return to this point below when we will see that a
phonology that is limited to concepts that correlate with phonetic events fails to
provide insight into many phonological phenomena.
According to some, the phonological primes (i.e. features) are hard-wired
as part of an innate human language capacity, rather than being ‘constructed’ from
scratch in the course of cognitive development and language acquisition. This
view must rely on somesort of evolutionary development whereby skills to make
certain kinds of sounds become hard-wired, presumably because of adaptive
advantages of somesort ( more on that below )
4

9. However, if this is so, and if spoken language ‘phonetics’ has determined
the nature of the primes in the evolutionary past, how can this same endowment
be helpful to a deaf person? Clearly, it cannot, and I am assuming here without
discussion that sign languages are true human languages that, as far as we know
now, share all essential structural properties with spoken languages. As a
consequence, deaf people either must construct their phonology in some other
way (perhaps using some non-specialized general cognitive ability that allows
them to construct a phonology-like conceptual system) or they have no
compositional conceptual system comparable to phonology at all, which implies
that conceptual representations of articulatory movements and perceptible forms
of signs are stored in the lexicon holistically. The first option is logically
consistent, although it predicts differences between the course of acquisition of
the phonologies of spoken and signed languages.
There appears to be little support for any significant differences. If
anything, the contrary is true. Striking similarities between the acquisition course
of languages in both modalities have been put forward as ‘evidence’ for the claim
that sign languages and spoken languages are both natural human languages,
stemming from the same innate capacity (Klima and Bellugi 1979, Emmorey
2002, Meier,Cormier and Quinto-Pozos 2002). The second option (sign languages
have no phonology) flies in the face of the results that installed the idea that sign
languages are natural languages in the first place. Stokoe’s seminal work (Stokoe
1960) lead to the recognition of the fact that sign languages, in fact, have a
phonology. This finding lead to an explosion of work on sign languages,
especially American Sign Language (Klima and Bellugi 1979, Emmorey 2002,
Fischer and van der Hulst 2003; see van der Hulst (1993, 1995, 1996, 2000), van
der Kooij (2002) for detailed discussion of phonological compositionality in signs
and many references to current work).
The conclusion must be that phonological categories are constructed in the
course of language acquisition. Elsewhere I propose that the innate language
faculty (or some more general faculty) provides a universal mechanism for
constructing the set of primitives and I specify the properties of that mechanism in
some detail (van der Hulst 1993, 2000, to appear d, in prep a).
5

10. CHAPTER 2
B. Phonological Construction
1. Groups of sounds
The fact that sounds do not come out of our mouths one segment at a time
has been known for a long time. In fact, many people have argued that segments
per se actually only exist as abstractions, because it appears that the smallest piece
of sound we can comfortably produce is larger than a single segment. If you think
about it, when you try to say a consonant, and particularly a stop, you are most
likely to say [thә] or [gә], and it’s really very hard to say [g] in isolation.
Furthermore, although the Roman alphabet (which is the basis for most
writing systems in the world) expresses segments directly, many other writing
systems don’t, but instead express units consisting of (at least) a consonant and a
vowel together, and may also include a following consonant. In the Japanese
syllabaries hiragana and katakana, and the Sanskrit and other writing systems
based on the Brahmi script each symbol stands for a consonant and vowel in an
indissoluble unit. The term used to describe this supra segmental unit is the well -
known term syllable.
There has been an enormous controversy about the status of this unit, with
opinions varying between those, on the one hand, who argued that it was an
unnecessary addition to the inventory of linguistic units (this was most strongly
argued for in Chomsky & Halle (1968), but other American Structuralists also felt
this way) and others, on the other hand, who have argued that segments are
inventions of linguists spoiled by the unnatural Roman writing system, and that
syllables are the smallest real linguistic units. One of the problems with the
concept of the syllable is that it is not a purely physical entity (like a vowel or a
consonant), in the sense that it does not correspond to any single physical gesture
of the articulators, nor to any single stretch of sound. This has led phoneticians to
be skeptical of its existence – one cannot see syllables in a spectrogram, nor in a
waveform. Similarly, syllables do not appear in x-ray films of people speaking. Of
course, for cognitive linguists (and in fact, for most linguists of any stripe)
language is not a physical event in any case but a cognitive one, so that the
inability to define a purely physical unit like the syllable is not a drawback.
6

11. Normally the easiest part of thinking about syllables is recognizing them
in words. If we take a word like anthropology we can easily see that it has five
syllables, and when we learn to spell (at least in English) we learn how to divide
the word into syllables: anthropology. Of course, things are rarely that simple.
The syllable division rules that we learned in school were orthographic rules –
rules for dividing the spelling of words. For example, we divide sitting as sit-ting,
but, of course, there aren’t two phonetic /t/’s in the word, only two spelled 〈t〉’s.
One of the facts that we find about syllables is that while we often know how
many syllables there are in the word, and can say the word syllable by syllable, we
find some difficulty in saying exactly where one syllable ends and the other
begins. Try saying satire one syllable at a time and you will happily say [sæ.tʰaır].
On the other hand, if you divide our earlier example sitting you might be less
comfortable with [sɪ.tʰIŋ]. Perhaps you said [sIt.tʰɪŋ], with a double [t], reflecting
the spelling, curiously enough. But of course neither pronunciation reflects the
undivided pronunciation of the word, which is without any kind of [t]: [sɪɾnIŋ].
The problem is that we can’t say either [*sɪɾ.ɪŋ] or [*sɪ.ɾɪŋ].
So where does the syllable divide? Later we’ll see that both before and
after as well as in the middle of the flap have been proposed as answers to the
question. Most linguists argue that syllables are organizational units of sound.
That means that they unite individual segments into constituents, much the same
way as words are organized into phrases, and phrases into clauses and so on.
Thus, it is argued, syllables have a hierarchical structure. This organizing
principle recurs not only in syntax (where clauses are made up of phrases which
are made up of words) but also in morphology, where words are made up of
suffixes and prefixes: deny(a verb) suffixed with – able makes a new adjective,
and then - ity can be added to make a new noun out of the new adjective:
deniability.
The traditional pieces of the syllable are the onset and the rhyme
(sometimes spelled rime). The onset consists of every segment up to but not
including the vowel, while the rhyme includes the rest of the syllable. The term
rhyme is, of course, familiar from poetry,
1. The period is normally used to divide syllables. Other symbols that are found
in the literature are the dollar sign $, and more complex notations representing
tree structure. We will discuss these below.
7

12. (1) Hickory dickory dock The mouse ran up the clock
Notice that it is only the vowel plus all following segments that must match –
what precedes is irrelevant.
The rhyme is divided into the nucleus and the coda. In the most simple
terms, the nucleus is the vowel and the remaining consonants are the coda. In the
above example, the nucleus is /ɑ/, the coda is /k/. What complicates the matter in
English is that both the nucleus and the coda can be rather more complex (as can,
for that matter, the onset). In a word like tasks there are three consonants in the
coda, and in sixths there are four: [ksθs]. English, incidentally, is relatively
unusual in permitting so many consonants in the coda. Four is near the top
permitted in the languages of the world, and in fact, in many languages the limit is
zero. well-known language that has such a limit is Hawai‘ian. If you think of
Hawai‘ian words (you probably know half a dozen) you will notice that every
consonant is followed by a vowel:
(2) Ho.no.lu.lu
Ha.le.a.ka.la
Ki.la.u.e.a
Ma.u.na Ke.a
We can classify the phonology of languages with respect to exactly what
they allow in their codas, with languages like Hawai‘ian representing one extreme
(zero consonants in the coda), and languages like English (up to four) representing
the other extreme. Other languages appear part way along this continuum. One
interesting set of restrictions is not on the number but on the kindof consonant
permitted in the coda. For example, in Japanese, there can be one consonant in
the coda, but there are heavy restrictions on what that consonant can be. It
can be either a nasal (Hon.da, Shim.bun) or a consonant identical to the consonant
following: tep.pan, Nip.pon, gak.kai.No other consonants are permitted in the
coda. Mandarin permits only nasals /n/ and /ŋ/, and in some dialects, /r/.
In general, languages make no restrictions on what can occur in nuclei,
except that it should be a vowel. Two vowels in a nucleus constitute one
definition of a diphthong, although defining a diphthong this way doesn’t
distinguish between rising and falling diphthongs (the /ju/ in cute vs the /aI/
in bite). The one complication involving nuclei involves whether things other
than vowels can occur in the nucleus. In some languages, such as English and
German, nasals can occupy the nucleus in unstressed syllables: hidden [hIdn̩
], German geben [gebm̩ ].
8

13. In other languages the restriction is not quite so strict.
In Czech /r/ can be a stressed nucleus: the city of Brno [ˈbr̩ no]. A
language that has been the subject of much recent inquiry is Imdlawn Tashlhiyt
Berber (spoken in North Africa) where apparently anyconsonant can be the
nucleus of a syllable. Some famous examples are /txznt/ meaning ‘you stored’,
which is syllabified [tx̩ .zn̩ t] and /tftkt/ (‘you suffered a strain’), which comes out
[tf̩ .t k̩ t] (Prince & Smolensky 1994). This is, of course, a highly unusual case –
languages greatly prefer relatively open segments to count as the center of
syllables.
As I mentioned above, a common assumption is that the parts of a syllable have a
hierarchical structure:
(3) σ
Onset Rhyme
Nucleus Coda
The reasons for this assumption include the fact that many languages have
rhyme (in the poetic sense) as a linguistic device. Other languages have
alliteration, which involves identity among Onsets. Old English was famous for
this device. In any line of Old English poetry there had to be at least two stressed
words with the same onset in one of their syllables (one in each half of the line):
(4) Stræt wæs stanfah, stig wisode
gúmum ætgædere. Gúðbyrne scan
However, there doesn’t seem to be any language whose poetry requires
identity between words which are identical in Onset+Nucleus while ignoring the
coda.
In addition, there are many cases in languages where there are restrictions
between the nucleus and the coda. For example, in English /ŋ/ forbids a preceding
tense vowel: [*iŋ, *eŋ] etc. However, onsets normally do not set restrictions on
what follows – any consonant in English can be followed by any vowel.
9

14. 2. The internal structure of the syllable
One of the main reasons for arguing that we need a syllable as a linguistic
unit is that manyphonological patterns appear to pay attention to syllable
structure. For example, it is simplest to describe the operation of aspiration in
English by making it sensitive to syllable structure. Consider the following data
(5) pie p
h
aI spy spaI
pacific p
h
ә.ˈsI.fIk specific spә.ˈsI.fIk
appear ә.p
h
ir aspire ә.spaIr
Note that whether the /p/ begins an accented or unaccented syllable, as long as it
is at the beginning of the onset it is aspirated. If something else precedes it (and,
of course, that something could only be an /s/) in the onset it is unaspirated.
Similarly, in German, obstruents are devoiced syllable-finally:
(6) abgehen ˈap.ge.әn ‘walk away’
wegfahren ˈvεk.fɑr.әn ‘drive away’
Burgmeister ˈb~rk.mai.stәr ‘mayor’
One additional issue that has been extensively discussed in the
phonological literature deals with how many consonants are permitted to
occur in onsets and codas. We have already seen the limiting case above –
none, along with the fact that many languages permit only limited kinds of
(single) consonants in codas. Every language permits at least one consonant in
onsets. In fact, there are languages which forbid empty onsets – Arabic requires
that every syllable begin with a consonant, although some have argued that
syllable initial glottal stop is simply an empty consonant fulfilling the function of
being an onset.
10

15. CHAPTER 3
C. The Role of Abstraction in Constructing Phonological
Structure
1. The Origins of Subsyllabic Structure
Syllables play a critical role in many domains of language processing,
including speech perception (Álvarez, Carreiras, & Perea, 2004), production
(Cholin, Levelt, & Schiller, 2006; Laganaro & Alario, 2006) and short-term
memory (Nimmo & Roodenrys, 2002). In this work, we focus on the internal
structure of syllabic units.
We review evidence that subsyllabic structure varies cross-linguistically.
English and other Indo-European languages group together vowels and codas
into an unit (‘rime’) distinct from the onset (Kessler & Treiman, 1997). For
example, the English syllable for ‘cat’ /kæt/ is argued to be composed of onset /k/
and rime /æt/. In contrast, Korean (Yoon & Derwing, 2001) and Japanese
(Katada, 1990)group onsets and vowels into a unit (‘body’) distinct from
the coda(such that the Korean syllable for ‘feather’ /kis/ is decomposed as body
/ki/ vs. coda /s/).
In this work, we argue that speakers construct these structures to
account for associations between segments that are not attributable to other,
more general, phonological patterns. We first review research showing that
in both Korean and English the distribution of segments provides robust
statistical cues to their contrasting subsyllabic structures; furthermore,
speakers are sensitive to these statistical cues (Lee & Goldrick, 2008). We then
present an analysis of a new, larger lexicon of Korean. This shows that robust
cues to subsyllabic structure are not found when considering representations
that incorporate the influence of more general phonological patterns. This is
consistent with the claim that learners postulate subsyllabic structures only after
correcting for other potential sources of phonological patterns.
11

16. 2. Cross linguistic Variation in Subsyllabic
Structure A variety of types of behavioral data suggest that
subsyllabic structures differ across languages. We focus on two prominent
subtypes involving alternate groupings of the nucleus and margin positions:
onset-rime (dividing a CVC syllable into C-VC) vs. body-coda (CV-C).
Subsyllabic Structure in Indo-European Languages Indo-European languages-
specifically, both Germanic (Dutch, English, German) and Romance
(French)—have been argued to group together the nucleus and coda into a unit
(rime) to the exclusion of the onset. The presence of this rime unit has been
used to account or the greater prevalence of phonotactic restrictions governing
vowel-coda vs. onset-vowel sequences (e.g., Dutch: Martensen, Maris, &
Dijkstra, 2000; English: Kessler & Treiman, 1997; French: Perruchet &
Peereman, 2004). In metalinguistic tasks, English speakers judge syllables
sharing the vowel and coda (but not onset) to be more similar than
syllables sharing the onset and vowel (but not coda; Yoon & Derwing,
1994). Finally, spontaneously occurring speech errors (e.g., MacKay, 1972)
as well as those produced in short-term memory tasks (e.g., Treiman & Danis,
1988) are more likely to involve the simultaneous misordering of the vowel and
coda (i.e., the rime unit) vs. the onset and vowel.
3. Subsyllabic Structure in Korean and Japanese
Similar evidence has been used to argue that Korean and Japanese
have a different subsyllabic structure, grouping the vowel and onset together to
the exclusion of the coda. With respect to metalinguistic tasks, Katada (1990)
documents a Japanese language game that involves reuse of onset-vowel
sequences, excluding any following codas. Yoon & Derwing (2001) show that
in contrast to the English pattern discussed above Korean speakers judge
syllables sharing the onset and vowel (but not coda) to be more similar than those
sharing only the vowel and coda. Kureta, Fushimi, & Tastumi (2006) find
that Japanese speakers use onset-vowel sequences to prepare responses in an
implicit priming paradigm (in contrast, Dutch speakers can rely on singleton
onsets; Meyer, 1991). As discussed in more detail below, Korean speech errors
are more likely to involve simultaneous misorderings of onsets and vowels
than vowels and codas (Lee & Goldrick, 2008).
12

17. CHAPTER 4
D. Phonology III: Syllable Structure, Stress
Words consist of syllables. The structure of syllables is determined partly
by universal and partly by language specific principles. In particular we shall
discuss the role of the sonoricity hierarchy in organising the syllabic structure, and
the principle of maximal onset.
Utterances are not mere strings of sounds. They are structured into units
larger than sounds. A central unit is the syllable. Words consist of one or several
syllables. Syllables in English begin typically with some consonants. Then comes
a vowel or a diphthong and then some consonants again. The first set of
consonants is the onset, the group of vowels the nucleus and the second group of
consonants the coda. The combination of nucleus and coda is called rhyme. So,
syllables have the following structure:
(75) [onset [nucleus coda]]
For example, /strength/ is a word consisting of a single syllable:
(76) [stɹ [ԑ ŋθ]]
Onset Nucleus Coda
Rhyme
Syllable
Thus, the onset consists of three consonants: [s], [t] and [ɹ], the nucleus consists
just of [ԑ], and the coda has [ŋ] and [θ]. We shall begin with some fundamental
principles. The first concerns the structure of the syllable.
a. Syllable Structure I (Universal )
Every syllable has a nonempty nucleus. Both coda and onset may
however be empty.
A syllable which has an empty coda is called open. Examples of open syllables
are /a/ [e] (onset is empty), /see/ [si] (onset is nonempty). A syllable that is
not open is closed. Examples are /in/ [ın] (onset empty) and /sit/ [sıt] (onset
nonempty). The second principle identifies the nuclei for English.
13

18. b. Vowels are Nuclear ( English )
A nucleus can only contain a vowel or a diphthong.
This principle is not fully without problems and that is the reason
that we shall look below at a somewhat more general principle.
The main problem is the unclear status of some sounds, for
example [ɚ]. They are in between a vowel and consonant, and
indeed sometimes end up in onset position (see above) and
sometimes in nuclear position, for example in /bird/ [bɚd].
The division into syllables is clearly felt by any speaker,
although there sometimes is hesitation as to exactly how to divide a
word into syllables. Consider the word /atmosphere/. Is the /s/ part
of the second syllable or part of the third? The answer is not
straightforward. In particular the stridents ( that is, the sounds [s],
[ʃ] ) enjoy a special status. Some claim that they are extrasyllabic
(not part of any syllable at all), some maintain that they are
ambisyllabic (they belong to both syllables). We shall not go into
that here.
The existence of rhymes can be attested by looking at
verses (which also explains the terminology): words that rhyme do
not need to end in the same syllable, they only need to end in the
same rhyme: /fun/ – /run/ – /spun/ – /shun/. Also, the coda is the
domain of a rule that affects many languages: For example, in
English and Hungarian, within the coda the obstruents must either
all be voiced or unvoiced; in German and Russian, all obstruents in
coda must be voiceless. (Here is an interesting problem caused
among other by nasals. Nasals are standardly voiced. Now try to
find out what is happening in this case by pronouncing words with
a sequence nasal+voiceless stop in coda, such as /hump/, /stunt/,
/Frank/.) Germanic verse in the Middle Ages used a rhyming
technique where the onsets of the rhyming words had to be the
same. (This is also called alliteration. It allowed to rhyme two
words of the same stem; German had a lot of Umlaut and ablaut,
that is to say, it had a lot of root vowel change making it
impossible to use the same word to rhyme with itself (say /run/ –
/ran/). It is worthwhile to remain with the notion of the domain of a
rule.
14

19. Many phonological constraints are seen as conditions that concern
two adjacent sounds. When these sounds come into contact, they
undergo change to a smaller or greater extent, for some sound
combinations are better pronounceable than others. We have
discussed sandhi at length in Lecture 4. For example, the Latin
word /in/ ‘in’ is a verbal prefix, which changes in writing (and
therefore in pronunciation) to /im/ when it precedes a labial
(/impedire/). Somewhat more radical is the change from [ml] to
[mpl] to avoid the awkward combination [ml] (the word
/templum/derives from /temlom/, with /tem/ being the root,
meaning ‘to cut’). There is an influential theory in phonology, auto
segmental phonology, which assumes that.
Table 10: The Sonoricity Hierarchy
dark vowels
[a], [o]
> mid vowels
[æ], [œ]
> high vowels
[i], [y]
> r-sounds
[r]; [ɹ]
> nasals; laterals
[m], [n]; [l]
> vd. fricatives
[z], [ӡ]
> vd. plosives
[b], [d]
> vl. fricatives
[s], [ʃ]
> vl. plosives
[p], [t]
phonological features are organized on different scores (tiers) and can spread to
adjacent segments independently from each other. Think for example of the
feature [±voiced]. The condition on the coda in English is expressed by saying
that the feature [±voiced] spreads along the coda. Clearly, we cannot allow the
feature to spread in discriminately, otherwise the total utterance is affected.
Rather, the spreading is blocked by certain constituent boundaries; these can be
the coda, onset, nucleus, rhyme, syllable, foot or the word. To put that on its head:
the fact that features are blocked indicates that we are facing a constituent
boundary. So, voicing harmony indicates that English has a coda.
15

20. The nucleus is the element that bears the stress. We have said that in
English it is a vowel, but this applies only to careful speech. In general this need
not be so. Consider the standard pronunciation of /beaten/: [ ‘bi:t
h
ᶇ] (with a
syllabic[n]). For my ears the division is into two syllables: [bi:] and [t
h
ᶇ]. (In
German this is certainly so; the verb /retten/ is pronounced [вԑt
h
ᶇ]. The [n] must
therefore occupy the nucleus of the second syllable.) There are more languages
like this. (Slavic languages are full of consonant clusters and syllables that do not
contain a vowel. Consider the island /Krk/, for example.) In general, phonologists
have posited the following conditions on syllable structure. Sounds are divided as
follows. The sounds are aligned into a so-called sonoricity hierarchy, which is
shown in Table 10 (vd. = voiced, vl. = voiceless). The syllable is organized as
follows.
c. Syllable Structure II
Within a syllable the sonoricity strictly increases and then
decreases again. It is highest in the nucleus.
This means that a syllable must contain at least one sound which is
at least as sonorous as all the others in the syllable. It is called the
sonoricity peak and is found in the nucleus. Thus, in the onset
consonants must be organized such that the sonority rises, while in
the coda it is the reverse. The conditions say nothing about the
nucleus. In fact, some diphthongs are increasing ([ıǝ] as in the
British English pronunciation of /here/) others are decreasing ([aı],
[oı]). This explains why the phonotactic conditions are opposite at
the beginning of the syllable than at the end. You can end a
syllable in [ɹt], but you cannot begin it that way. You can start a
syllable by [tɹ], but you cannot end it that way (if you to make up
words with [tɹ], automatically, [ɹ] or even [tɹ] will be counted as
part of the following syllable). Let me briefly note why diphthongs
are not considered problematic in English: it is maintained that the
second part is actually a glide (not a vowel), and so would have to
be part of the coda. Thus, /right/ would have the following
structure:
16

21. (77)
The sonoricity of [j] is lower than that of [a], so it is not nuclear.
A moment’s reflection now shows why the position of
stridents is problematic: the sequence [ts] is the only legitimate
onset according to the sonoricity hierarchy, [st] is ruled out.
Unfortunately, both are attested in English, with [ts] only occurring
in non-native words (eg /tse-tse/, /tsunami/). There are
phonologists who even believe that [s] is part of its own little
structure here (‘extrasyllabic’). In fact, there are languages which
prohibit this sequence; Spanish is a case in point. Spanish avoids
words that start with [st]. Moreover, Spanish speakers like to add
[e] in front of words that do and are therefore difficult to
pronounce. Rather than say [stɹenӡ] (/strange/) they will say
[estôen ]. The effect of this maneuver is that [s] is now part of the
coda of an added syllable, and the onset is reduced (in their speech)
to just [tô], or, in their pronunciation most likely [tr]. Notice that
this means that Spanish speakers apply the phonetic rules of
Spanish to English, because if they applied the English rules they
would still end up with the onset [stɹ] (see below). French is
similar, but French speakers are somehow less prone to add the
vowel. (French has gone through the following sequence: from [st]
to [est] to [et]. Compare the word /étoile/ ‘star’, which derives from
Latin /stella/ ‘star’.)
17
r a j t
O N C C

22. d. Stress
Syllables are not the largest phonological unit. They are
themselves organized into larger units. A group of two, sometimes
three syllables is called a foot. A foot contains one syllable that is
more prominent than the others in the same foot. Feet are grouped
into higher units, where again one is more prominent than the
others, and so on. Prominence is marked by stress. There are
various ways to give prominence to a syllable. Ancient Greek is
said to have marked prominence by pitch (the stressed syllable was
about a fifth higher (3/2 of the frequency of an unstressed syllable).
Other languages (like German) use loudness. Other languages use
combination of the two (Swedish). Within a given word there is
one syllable that is the most prominent. In IPA it is marked by a
preceding [ˈ]. We say that it carries primary stress. Languages
differ with respect to the placement of primary stress. Finnish and
Hungarian place the stress on the first syllable, French on the last.
Latin put the stress on the last but one (penultimate), if it was long
(that is to say, had a long vowel or was closed); otherwise, if was a
syllable that preceded it (the antepenultimate) then that syllable
got primary stress. Thus we had pe.re.gri.nus (‘foreign’) with stress
on the penultimate (gri) since the vowel was long, but in.fe.ri.or
with stress on the antepenultimate /fe/ since the /i/ in the
penultimate was short. (Obviously, monosyllabic words had the
stress on the last syllable.) Sanskrit was said to have free stress,
that is to say, stress was free to fall anywhere in the word.
Typically, within a foot the syllables like to follow in a
specific pattern. If the foot has two syllables, it consists either in an
unstressed followed by a stressed syllable (iambic metre), or vice
versa (trochaic metre).
18

23. Sometimes a foot carries three syllables (a stressed followed by
two unstressed ones, a dactylus). So, if the word has more than
three syllables, there will be a syllable that is more prominent than
its neighbours but not carrying main stress. You may try this with
the word /antepenultimate/. You will find that the first syllable is
more prominent than the second but less than the fourth. We say
that it carries secondary stress: [̩antԑpǝn'˄ltımԑt]. Or [ǝ'sımǝ'leıʃn].
The so-called metrical stress theory to account for stress as
follows. The syllables are each represented by a cross (×). This is a
Layer 0 stress. Then, in a sequence of cycles, syllables get assigned
more crosses. The more crosses, the heavier the syllable. The
number of crosses is believed to correspond to the absolute weight
of a syllable. So, a word that has a syllable of weight 3 (three
crosses) is less prominent than one with a syllable of weight 4.
Let’s take tries to account for stress as follows. The syllables are
each represented by a cross (×). This is a Layer 0 stress. Then, in a
sequence of cycles, syllables get assigned more crosses. The more
crosses, the heavier the syllable. The number of crosses is believed
to correspond to the absolute weight of a syllable. So, a word that
has a syllable of weight 3 (three crosses) is less prominent than one
with a syllable of weight 4. Let’s take
(78)
We have five syllables. Some syllables get extra crosses. The
syllable [sı] carries primary stress in /assimilate/. Primary stress is
always marked in the lexicon, and this mark tells us that the
syllable must get a cross. Further, heavy syllables get an additional
cross.
19
Layer 0 X X X X X
ǝ sl mǝ lel ʃn

24. A syllable counts as heavy in English if it has a coda or a
diphthong or long vowel. So, [leı] gets an extra cross. [ʃn] is not
heavy since the [n] is nuclear. So this is now the situation at Layer
1:
(79)
Next, the nominalisation introduces main stress on the fourth
syllable. So this syllable gets main stress and is therefore assigned
another cross. The result is this:
(80)
If larger units are considered, there are more cycles. The word
/maintain/ for example has this representation by itself:
(81)
To get this representation, all we have to know is where the
primary stress falls. Both syllables are heavy and therefore get an
extra cross at Layer 1. Then the main syllable gets a cross at Layer
2. Now, if the two are put together, a decision must be made which
of the two words is more prominent. It is the second, and this is
therefore what we get:
20
Layer 1 X X
Layer 2 X X X X X
ǝ sl mǝ lel ʃn
Layer 2 X
Layer 1 X X
Layer 0 X X X X X
ǝ sl mǝ lel ʃn
Layer 2 X
Layer 1 X X
Layer 0 X X
meln teln

25. (82)
Notice that the stress is governed by a number of heterogeneous
factors. The first is the weight of the syllable; this decides about
Layer 1 stress. Then there is the position of the main stress (which
in English must to a large extent be learned - equivalently, it must
explicitly be given in the representation, unlike syllable structure).
Third, it depends on the way in which the word is embedded into
larger units (so syntactic criteria play a role here). Also,
morphological formation rules can change the location of the main
stress! For example, the suffix (a)tion attracts stress (['kǝm'baın]
and ['kǝmbı'neıʃn]) so does the suffix ee (as in /employee/), but
/ment/ does not (['gavɚn] and ['gavɚnment]). The suffix /al/ does
move the accent without attracting it (['ænԑkdot] versus
['ænԑk'dotal]).
Finally, we mention a problem concerning the
representations that keeps coming up. It is said that certain
syllables cannot receive stress because they contain a vowel that
cannot be stressed (for example, schwa: [ǝ]). On the other hand, we
can also say that a vowel is schwa because it is unstressed. Take,
for example, the pair ['ɹiǝlaız] and [̩ɹiǝlı'zeıʃn]. When the stress
shifts, the realisation of /i/ changes. So, is it rather the stress that
changes and makes the vowel change quality or does the vowel
change and make the stress shift? Often, these problems find no
satisfactory answer.
21
Layer 3 X
Layer 2 X X
Layer 1 X X X X
Layer 0 X X X X X X X
meln teln ǝ sl mǝ lel ʃn

26. In this particular example it seems that the stress shift is
first, and it induces the vowel change. It is known that unstressed
vowels undergo reduction in time. The reason why French stress in
always on the last syllable is because it inherited the stress pattern
from Latin, but the syllables following the stressed syllable
eventually got lost. Here the stress was given and it drove the
development.
22

27. 1. CONCLUSION
Modeling Phonological Construction of speech is a critical issue in speech
recognition. In this paper, we report our recent development of an overlapping
feature based phonological model that represents long-span contextual
dependency in speech acoustics. In this model, high-level linguistic constraints are
incorporated in automatic construction of the patterns of feature overlapping and
of the hidden Markov model (HMM) states induced by such patterns. The main
linguistic information explored includes groups of sound, syllable structure
(Universal ), The internal structure of syllable, vowels are nuclear, and word
stress. A consistent computational framework developed for the construction of
the feature-based model and the major components of the model are described.
Experimental results on the use of the overlapping-feature model in an HMM-
based system for speech recognition show improvements over the conventional
triphone - based phonological model.
2. SUGGESTION
The aim of this study all reader be able to explore The Phonological
Construction Comprehensible to examine whether the sentence comprehension of
this features are affected by limitation of Phonological Construction, and if so,
which types of sentences are affected. More specifically, the reader could
declarative or developing the sentences in this case. The participants to create the
students have motivated.

28. REFERENCES
Hulst,H. van der. 2003. Cognitive Phonology. University of Connecticut
Nathan, Geoffrey S. 2008. Phonology A Cognitive Grammar Introduction (
Cognitive Linguistic in Practice [ CLP ] 3 ). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John
Benjamins
Goldrick, Matthew. 2016. The Role of Abstraction in Constructing Phonological
Structure. Northwestern University. Evanston, IL 60208 USA
Kracht, Marcus. Introduction to Linguistics. Los Angeles, CA 90095 – 1543