Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

16.1 The structure of the syllable
Unit 16 Rhyme and sound patterning
Section 4 Poetic form

In the process of reading words on a page, we translate visual marks (letters) into mental representations of sounds (phones, or phonemes). English uses a ’phonetic-alphabetic script’ in which letters stand for sounds, or serve to represent particular patterns of sound. For example, the letter ’p’ in ’pin’ stands for a single sound (which we write phonetically as [p]); the two letters ’th’ in ’thin’ stand for a single sound (which we write phonetically as [0]); the letter ’i’ in ’time’ stands for a combination of sounds called a diphthong (which we write phonetically as [a i]). We can represent the way a word is made up of sounds using a phonetic script, and so can compare the letter-spelling of a word with the phonetic structure of the word:

In this unit we are interested in the phonetic structure of words rather than their spelling. Because of the relatively small number of distinct sounds used in a language, the sounds of a text inevitably occur and recur as we read. and make up a kaleidoscope of repetitions and permutations. In casual conversation and most kinds of written texts, this repetition of sounds occurs for the most part apparently randomly, ordered only by the historical accidents governing which sounds make up which words. However, it is also possible for speakers and writers to organize the sounds of utterances in more systematic ways - ranging from motivated but irregular instances through to fully predictable patterns - in order to achieve certain effects. Many different types of discourse employ such sound patterning: poetry, jokes, slogans, proverbs, advertising copy, sound-bites in political speeches and interviews, pop lyrics, rapping, etc.

16.1 The structure of the syllable

In Unit 17 we will see that the metrical form of a poem involves control over the syllables of the line, and syllables are also relevant for the organization of sound patterning. Rhyme and alliteration, the two basic kinds of sound patterning, involve different parts of the syllable. A syllable is divided into three parts (of which only the nucleus is essential): the onset, the nucleus and the coda. Table 16.1 illustrates this division of the syllable into three parts, using monosyllabic words.

Table 16.1

This table shows us several things about syllables and sounds.

1 An onset can have anything from zero to three consonants, while a coda usually has between zero and two consonants. But there is always a nucleus.

2 The number of written letters before or after the nucleus is irrelevant; syllable structure is a matter of sound and not spelling and so both ’bite’ and ’fight’ have a one-consonant coda.

3 While the nucleus of a syllable is almost always a vowel, there are some written vowels that are not syllable nuclei because they are not pronounced as vowels: thus ’paste’ is a monosyllalic word based on the nucleus vowel [a], and the final written ’e’ is irrelevant to the syllable structure.

The nucleus of the syllable is usually a vowel. Sometimes the nucleus of the syllable is a diphthong, which is two vowels pronounced together as in ’wheel’, which is a single-syllable word with a two-vowel diphthong as its nucleus (in phonetic representation it is [i ǝ]). The nucleus can also be a highly ’sonorant’ consonant; sonorance is a vocal quality of vowels, but some consonants such as [r] and [l] and the nasal consonants [m] and [n] also have sonorance and so they can be syllable nuclei. For example, the word ’bottle’ has two syllables, the second of which has [l] as its nucleus.