There is a further issue regarding how many things of a higher level can immediately dominate a thing of a lower level, for example can a segment be in two syllables at the same time? (Of course people have made claims for other possibilities, this is just the bare bones that is well-supported). A phonological word may immediately dominate a continuous sequence of feet. A foot may immediately dominate a continuous sequence of syllables.
A syllable may immediately dominate a continuous sequence of segments and moras. Wording from the bottom up, a mora may immediately dominate a continuous sequence of segments. There is a quasi-standard formal theory of prosodic objects stemming from work in the 70's and 80's, which posits a set of prosodic objects – mora, syllable, foot, "phonological word". So I could interpret the question as asking "what are the necessary and sufficient criteria for analyzing some substring of speech as a syllable", and "what are the required and optional properties of a syllable in a formal theory of phonology, and how do they relate to other phonological objects"? To complicate the matter a bit, you could also ask about "phonetic syllables". The problem is that we use definitions to encapsulate all of our knowledge about a thing, and we also use them to formally relate one thing to another thing in a mathematical theory of phonological things. There is some unclarity in your question, but that is largely the fault of linguistics as a field, which I regret to say doesn't have a solid grip on what a "definition" is. I am a complete layman, so just reading through your comment or answer can be a big task for me. If I am not responding to your comment or answer immediately, that is probably because it is taking me a lot of time to take in your comment or answer. To wit, I would like to know if there is a definition of a syllable and that of a syllabic consonant that collectively are not circular in nature. Perhaps what is often presented as the definition of a syllable is actually a mere description? I wonder if the notion of syllable is innately understood by native speakers of a particular language, but cannot be objectively defined, particularly not by a quantifiable measure. More importantly, it does not give a concrete threshold of sonority level for a phone to be able to be a syllable nucleus, so it still does not answer when a consonant is considered syllabic and when it is not. But some would argue that it just paraphrases the criteria of a phone being able to be a nucleus of a syllable or not, as its sonority level being high or low.
Admittedly, this is not a precise definition, but I do think it captures the underlying idea. One such definition of a syllable I found is this: a syllable is marked by a peak in sonority. The only way to break this cycle is to define either one differently, without referencing the other. A syllabic consonant is a consonant that can be a nucleus of a syllable.
#Sonority definition series#
A syllable is a series of sounds with exactly one nucleus, which is either a vowel or a syllabic consonant, with optional consonants surrounding it.I think what we have here now are two circular definitions: It gets confusing, however, when you factor in syllabic consonants, which they say can also be nuclei of syllables. This works for me because I think the distinction between vowels and consonants are relatively clear (except for glides, IMHO). What exactly is the definition of a syllable? What I often see is essentially this: a syllable is a series of sounds with exactly one nucleus, which is a vowel, with optional consonants surrounding it. So please excuse my ignorance if this is too basic a question. I just teach English to Japanese audience.
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