On syllabification

[alice]

I woke up this morning, and this was rolling around my head.
I woke up this morning, and this was rolling around my head.
I couldn't work it out, so I thought I'd ask the ZBB instead.

How, in English, does the trained linguist syllabify a word like sitting, where the first syllable contains a lax vowel? Is it:

• /sɪ.tɪŋ/? No; this sounds wrong; lax vowels aren't normally found in open syllables.

• /sɪt.ɪŋ/? No; this is definitely not how anybody says it.

• /sɪt.tɪŋ/? No; the medial consonant is definitely not geminated.

So what is it?

More generally, is this uncertainty a feature of other languages too? It might well be in Dutch and German, but definitely not n French, where vous avez is unarguably /vu.za.ve/. Is there a cross-linguistic principle at work here?

[bradrn]

I woke up this morning, and this was rolling around my head.
I woke up this morning, and this was rolling around my head.
I couldn't work it out, so I thought I'd ask the ZBB instead.

How, in English, does the trained linguist syllabify a word like sitting, where the first syllable contains a lax vowel? Is it:

The trained linguist argues about it interminably.

(Or, in my case, I argue that sharp syllable boundaries don’t exist in general.)

[Creyeditor]

At least in German the standard analysis of these cases in most frameworks of theoretical phonology seems to be that these consonants are ambisyllabic, i.e. they belong to both syllables. I find this baffling; it sounds much easuer to give up on the fictional closed syllable restriction on lax vowels.

[KathTheDragon]

• /sɪ.tɪŋ/? No; this sounds wrong; lax vowels aren't normally found in open syllables.

For me it is this option.

[chris_notts]

At least in German the standard analysis of these cases in most frameworks of theoretical phonology seems to be that these consonants are ambisyllabic, i.e. they belong to both syllables. I find this baffling; it sounds much easuer to give up on the fictional closed syllable restriction on lax vowels.

This feels intuitively right to me as an English speaker, and I feel like the stop is slightly longer in that position too.

[2+3 Clusivity]

(1) /sɪ.tɪŋ/?
<>lax vowels aren't normally found in open syllables. agreed for me
<>Same as (2), a sequence like this would usually give me [/sɪt.tʰɪŋ/] or [/sɪʔ.tʰɪŋ/]

(2) /sɪt.tɪŋ/? No; the medial consonant is definitely not geminated.
<>Same as above.

(3) /sɪt.ɪŋ/? No; this is definitely not how anybody says it.
<>this actually seems closest. Almost a: [sɪt.ŋ̍] ~ [sɪd.ŋ̍].

[zompist]

How, in English, does the trained linguist syllabify a word like sitting, where the first syllable contains a lax vowel? Is it:

• /sɪ.tɪŋ/? No; this sounds wrong; lax vowels aren't normally found in open syllables.

• /sɪt.ɪŋ/? No; this is definitely not how anybody says it.

• /sɪt.tɪŋ/? No; the medial consonant is definitely not geminated.

I just re-read the appropriate section in Lass's Phonology, so now I can say not just "I dunno" but "linguists don't know either, though they'll claim they do."

Lass discusses two approaches, universalistic and phonotactic. The first consists of general principles claimed to be universal, such as a preference for CV syllables and dividing CC clusters (plus special rules for liquids). Lass points out that the general principles seem to be frequently violated— e.g. it's hard to maintain that Russian and English handle /kt/ precisely the same, when kt- is a possible initial only in Russian.

The phonotactic principle is that syllables can't violate the rules found in monosyllables. E.g. h can't end a syllable in English, so "behave" can only be be-have, not beh-ave. This is the principle you're using to rule out /sɪ-tɪŋ/.

He goes on to say that sometimes phonotactics just doesn't help. E.g. "secret" could be se-cret or sec-ret; [si], [sik], [rət], and [krət] are all possible English syllables. In that case he thinks we can assign the consonant(s) to both syllables.

He doesn't say, but I will, that the phonotactic approach rather begs the question. Why should the same rules apply to monosyllables and multisyllable words? Some environments only appear in multisyllable words! E.g. in English [ɾ] can only appear intervocalically— it can't begin or end a monosyllable, so the phonotactic principle tells us nothing here.

You could probably get into where people can put incremental pauses and such— I think that's where you're getting the claim that nobody says [sɪt ɪŋ]. I'm not sure this is a very solid principle. E.g., people sometimes slow down a word for emphasis: "Ab -so -lute- ly." I suspect this is not an insight into the phonemics of the word; it's more of a language game like spelling it out, or Pig Latin. For one thing, it's deeply influenced by the spelling— I actually say this word with a [p], but I wouldn't say "ap -so -lute -ly."

in French, where vous avez is unarguably /vu.za.ve/.

That's a sandhi phenomenon, or liaison as your French teacher would have called it. In fact Lass seems to take it as a principle that words are always separated by syllable boundaries! He doesn't discuss sandhi, which is a pity. I'll give you an even weirder example from Sanskrit: devas api > devopi. The thing is, if syllabification has nothing to do with word boundaries, we can no longer use the phonotactic principle, which depends on word boundaries.

[Emily]

/sɪ.tɪŋ/? No; this sounds wrong; lax vowels aren't normally found in open syllables.

fix this analysis and idk if you've solved the underlying question yet but you've at least gotten rid of the paradox. i think the environments where lax vowels are and aren't found in english aren't closed vs. open syllables, it's followed vs. not followed by a consonant

[Estav]

As Zompist said, there is no consensus among linguists about whether sitting is /sɪ.tɪŋ/, /sɪt.ɪŋ/, /sɪt.tɪŋ/, or (a fourth option) syllables simply don't exist. (Actually, some would argue that /ŋ/ is not a phoneme of English and that this word ends in /nɡ/, but that's a different topic.)

Italian and Latin don't have the same ambiguity with intervocalic singleton consonants, but in these languages the syllabification of /s/ + C sequences is problematic: although these sequences can occur word-initially, they pattern in some respects like heterosyllabic consonant sequences when they occur word-medially (e.g. in terms of how they interact with vowel and syllable length).

[alice]

Thanks everyone, even if it's a long way of saying "It's complicated" It's good to know my suffering yesterday morning was not in vain.

[vlad]

John Wells has argued that it's /sɪt.ɪŋ/.

• /sɪt.ɪŋ/? No; this is definitely not how anybody says it.

What does this mean? What is the actual phonetic difference between /sɪt.ɪŋ/ and /sɪ.tɪŋ/?

[KathTheDragon]

John Wells has argued that it's /sɪt.ɪŋ/.

Having read through this, I can agree with him under the presumption that syllables are in fact a purely phonological phenomenon, and (as I believe others here have argued before) there is nothing phonetic that corresponds with them. So in English they can only be identified by the allophonic effects they have, as pointed out in the link. What we think of as syllables when we actually pronounce a word must be something different to phonological syllables, then.

[Estav]

What we think of as syllables when we actually pronounce a word must be something different to phonological syllables, then.

If introspection led to unanimous agreement on where syllable divisions go in English words, then we could use it as a criterion without much difficulty. But there doesn't seem to be agreement about everything. People have done some studies on where English speakers say syllable divisions go, although I don't have any at hand right now to reference.

In my case (perhaps influenced by thinking about the issue over the years), I don't feel like I have any particular intuition that e.g. sinning and resting are syllabified differently from singing and lifting, despite the fact that [n] and [st] can start words but [ŋ] and [ft] can't. In the context of hyphenating the written words, "sinning" would obviously be divided as "sin-ning", "resting" I think I would divide as "rest-ing", "singing" would have to be "sing-ing" and "lifting" would I think be "lift-ing".

In the context of e.g. singing in a choir, I would try to linger on the vowels in the first syllable for the duration of the first note and then quickly pass to the consonants at the start of the next note, which could be interpreted as using the syllabifications "si-nning, re-sting, si-nging, li-fting", although I wouldn't necessarily consider this to be a matter of syllabification.

On the other hand, if I imagine a word game where I'm supposed to transform the input into the output by repeating the last syllable, it does come fairly naturally to say forms like "resting-sting", "sinning-ning" but of course not "singing-nging" or "lifting-fting". (And "sitting-ting" doesn't sound right in this context.)

[Travis B.]

My native intuition is that not only single consonants between vowels where the following vowel is unstressed are generally ambisyllabic, but furthemore many consonants clusters that can behave as single units such as /sC/ also are practically ambisyllabic in such environments. Of course, consonant clusters such as /ft/ are broken up across syllable boundaries. There are a few exceptions such as /ŋ/, which can only end a syllable, and /h/, which can only start a syllable, as has been mentioned.

Of course, my reason support much of said native intuition is that consonants such as /t/ and consonant clusters such as /nt/ very often have different allophones depending on whether they fall at the start of a stressed syllable, are in the onset of a stressed syllable but not at the start, are intervocalic, or are postvocalic.

[alice]

Returning to my second point, do speakers of French consider avez to be syllabified /a.ve/, /av.e/, or /av.ve/? How does this apply to languages with strong preferences for CV syllables, such as Italian or Finnish?

[Moose-tache]

Syllable boundaries can also be analyzed at different levels independently.

If I imagine saying the word "sitting" very slowly and clearly while clapping on each syllable because I'm being sassy and condescending, the /t/ is on the second syllable. But this is how a word is parsed into syllables. It does not mean that things like consonant and vowel realization, stress patterns, etc. are not acting as if the /t/ is the coda of the first syllable.

A good analogy would be stress. If I say "fourteen," the iambic stress causes the /t/ to avoid flapping in my dialect. But if I say "No, not thirteen. fourteen," the prosodic stress can shift to the first syllable of the word without affecting the flapping-stress rule. This may not be a perfect example, please don't nitpick it too much. It's just meant to illustrate what could be happening with syllabification. Prosodic syllabification and diachronic phonemic syllabification could operate on two levels independently of one another. The main consequence of this is that when we ask "where does the t go?" We need to define our realm of inquiry very specifically.

[Travis B.]

"No, not thirteen. fourteen,"

Thirteen and fourteen are weird words for me because I pronounce them with geminates, specifically as /θərt.ˈtin/ [t̪ʁ̩ˤʔt.ˈtʰĩ(ː)n] and /fɔrt.ˈtin/ [fɔʁˤʔt.ˈtʰĩ(ː)n]. Apparently I am not alone in this sort of pronunciation.

[Moose-tache]

Well, OK, you can make the same illustration with a different word if you prefer.
"I detest that student."
"Why would you test them twice?"
"No, not 'retest,' detest." (lack of flapping, despite shift in stress)
My point was simply that phonemic and prosodic stress can operate independently, and a similar thing may be happening with syllabification.

[Travis B.]

Well, OK, you can make the same illustration with a different word if you prefer.
"I detest that student."
"Why would you test them twice?"
"No, not 'retest,' detest." (lack of flapping, despite shift in stress)
My point was simply that phonemic and prosodic stress can operate independently, and a similar thing may be happening with syllabification.

Point taken, and yes, "detest" would be pronounced without flapping to me.

[Ares Land]

Returning to my second point, do speakers of French consider avez to be syllabified /a.ve/, /av.e/, or /av.ve/? How does this apply to languages with strong preferences for CV syllables, such as Italian or Finnish?

Oh, definitely /a.ve/. French prefers vowel-final syllables wherever possible.

Vous avez is /vu.za.ve/ BTW.

Italian and Latin don't have the same ambiguity with intervocalic singleton consonants, but in these languages the syllabification of /s/ + C sequences is problematic: although these sequences can occur word-initially, they pattern in some respects like heterosyllabic consonant sequences when they occur word-medially (e.g. in terms of how they interact with vowel and syllable length).

Italian's an interesting case -- historically /s/ + C sequences were heterosyllabic across word boundaries. I think now syllabification is very ambiguous. Hence Medieval Italian in Ispagna vs. Mod. Italian in Spagna.