Invariant syllable skeleton, complex segments and word edges

Abstract

<jats:p>San Duanmu's<jats:italic>Syllable Structure: The Limits of Variation</jats:italic>raises a number of questions that are of general interest for phonological theory. Of special interest here are: the genesis and management of linearity in complex segments, the place of analogy (or paradigm uniformity) in grammar, the role of morphology in accounting for phonological patterns, the balance of static (distributional patterns) and dynamic (phonological processes) evidence for syllable structure, the role of stress in syllabification, and the import of corpus-based data for phonological analysis. In each case, Duanmu's proposals are evaluated according to their intrinsic consistency, the empirical record and the relevant body of literature. Alternative ways of handling the phenomena are offered, and these are fairly traditional in most cases. Duanmu's book is particularly relevant in the current constitution of the field where the see-saw movement between computation and representations seems to swing back in direction of the latter after having long been immobilised on the computational end. Standing clearly on the representational side, the theory exposed in the book aims to show that all surface strings may be reduced to a fixed and invariant syllable template, C(onsonant)V(owel)X. This enterprise is interesting especially in presence of another representationally-oriented theory, CVCV (Lowenstamm 1996, Scheer 2004), which also aims at reducing surface variation to an invariant syllabic skeleton, made of a monotonic sequence of CV units. However, the CVX and the CVCV templates are quite distinct, and the strategies that are used in order to accommodate the surface string are opposite (shrinking in the former case, expanding in the latter).</jats:p>

Book Notice

“…As Scheer (2012) has noted, the syllabification practice in the CELEX database is not theory-neutral. For example, CELEX treats the second consonant in bellen /bɛlən/ as ambisyllabic, and Duanmu simply excludes consonants tagged ambisyllabic without defending the ambisyllabicity analysis or its application in CELEX.…”

“…In doing so, Duanmu operates on a remarkably liberal interpretation of compounding and affixation: words like bracelet and even Shakespeare are said to be 'perceived compounds', while borstal and ecstasy are analysed as having perceived affixes (-al and ex-), without independent, psycholinguistic evidence. In a separate review, Scheer (2012) wonders why many English words with non-final heavy rhymes, such as bolster and fealty, escaped Duanmu's attention. The answer is very likely that these have simply been excluded based on an overly permissive definition of affixation.…”

“…While the CVX theory did not pass the empirical test with flying colours, Duanmu should be commended for an intellectually stimulating monograph that questions the freedom of languages to vary in syllable structure. I also recommend the reviews by Scheer (2012) and Blevins (2010), which raise important points both about the CVX theory itself and wider issues in the literature, such as complex segments, syllable variability and the use of distributional evidence in phonological argumentation.…”