12.1895, Sum: Syllabic Consonants

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-12-1895. Wed Jul 25 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 12.1895, Sum: Syllabic Consonants

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1)
Date:  Wed, 25 Jul 2001 11:05:38 +0000
From:  "Zoe Toft" <zoetoft at hotmail.com>
Subject:  Syllabic Consonants

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Wed, 25 Jul 2001 11:05:38 +0000
From:  "Zoe Toft" <zoetoft at hotmail.com>
Subject:  Syllabic Consonants

Dear all,

A couple of weeks back I posted a query on Linguist regarding syllabic
consonants. Below I summarize the responses I received and the original
request. Let me here thank all those who contacted me with suggestions and
expressions of interest.

Zoe Toft
............
My original request went as follows:

<<I am a PhD student at the school of Oriental and African Studies in
London, UK and am looking for references on languages with so called
syllabic consonants. Bell (1978) cites 85 languages with syllabic consonants
but some of his original sources have been liberally interpreted for
inclusion in this category and very few provide any sort of phonetic data
(which is not surprising given the age of many of his sources). Therefore I
am trying to update his database and would appreciate your input. Blevins
(1995:220) provides a table on the parametric variation in syllabic
segments, ranging from Kabardian, which only allows non high vowels as
syllabic segments, to Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber which allows all types of
segments, including fricatives and stops, to be syllabic segments. I would
like to find more examples for inclusion in her table: Do you know of
languages which allow for rhotic but not lateral or nasal sonorants as
syllabic constituents (cf Sanskrit)? Or languages which allow for fricative
syllabic consonants, but not stops (cf Dakelh/Carrier)?. I would be
particularly interested to hear of a language where voicing plays a role in
the potential of a segment to be syllabic: if we accept a general version of
the sonority hierarchy (e.g. Katamba 1989:104), voiced segments are more
sonorant than voiceless ones and thus one could conceive of a language
which, for example, allows voiced fricative syllabic stops but not voiceless
ones. Please send suggestions and references to me at: 109299 at soas.ac.uk>>

James Fidelholtz suggested I consider interjections in English such as
'pst', 'bzz', 'humph' /[Mm] when considering any difference in voicing with
respect to syllabic consonants

John Frampton pointed me towards a paper of his called "SPE Extensions"
which can be found at http://www.math.neu.edu/ling/ .

Yuri Kleiner remarked that ' practically any consonant can become syllabic
in a less sonorant environment, e.g. /s/ in German PST! This has been known,
at least, since Otto Jespersen. Even here, however, we ought to discern
between the true syllabic consonants as in Czech BRNO (dissyllabic, stressed
on the FIRST SYLLABLE) and cases like English (a) BOTTLE (syllabic l varying
with schwa + l; likewise in German), (b) CODDLE and (c) TUMBLE (syllabicity
retained in CODDLING and lost in TUMBLING; cf. Russian where the behaviour
of the syllabic consonant in words like P'OTR - P'ETRA is similar to TUMBLE
- TUMBLING, rather than CODDLE - CODDLING). As we can see, [+/- syylabicity]
of the consonant, besides its phonetic chrarctristics (probably more or less
universal) depends on the structure of the syllable, which is invariably
language specific. Therefore any typology that does not take this into
account is doomed to be misleading,'  and referred me to an article of his:
"The Privileged Position a Quarter Century Later." In: Kurt Gustav
Goblirsch, Martha Berryman Mayou, and Marvin Taylor (eds.), Germanic Studies
in Honor of Anatoly Libermans^1.s^0 North-Western European Language Evolution
(NOWELE) 31-32. Odense: Odense University Press, 1997. Pp. 157-73. >>

Max Wheeler suggested John Coleman's article 'The phonetics and phonology of
Tashlhiyt Berber syllabic consonants', Transactions of the Philological
Society 99.1, 2001, 29-64, where Coleman argues against the claim that
Tashlhiyt has many syllabic consonants.

Daniel Recasens told me that Majorcan Catalan (a dialect of Catalan spoken
in the Balearic islands) has syllabic r and l word finally and that these
consonants may be preceded by a stop or the fricative /f/. (Illustrative
examples would be entr 'I go in', dobl 'I double'..) He has carried out some
experimental work in order to find out about the voicing and syllabic status
of these consonants using electropalatography and acoustics and has a paper
on the subject.

Willem Visser pointed me towards a chapter on syllabic consonants in Frisian
in his doctoral thesis  'The Syllable in Frisian (HIL Dissertations; 30),
Holland Academic Graphics, The Hague, 1997, ISBN: 90-5569-030-9.'
Johannes Reese pointed me towards German and related languages like Low
Saxon, Dutch, German dialects, Danish where nasals and laterals occur as
syllable nuclei in reduced syllables. 'There are numerous examples of
fricatives which break the sonority hierarchy, but are nevertheless included
into the syllable, as in Stein [StaIn] `stone' or "Herbsts" [hE5psts] `of
the autumn'.'

Christopher Miller wrote 'Serb/Croat is such a language: whereas Czech
allows both syllabic /r/ and /l/ (e.g. trh '(market) square' and vlk "wolf",
Serb/Croat only allows syllabic /r/, cf. trg '(market) square' but vuk
instead of etymological vlk. (I give only a single example for each but the
correspondences are quite regular across the two languages.) Neither
language allows syllabic nasals. Mandarin Chinese may be another example,
cf. the final retroflex -(e)r suffix and the retroflex realisation of
orthographic <i> after (Pinyin) orthographic ch, zh, sh and r; it would also
be worthwhile to consult relevant sources about the curious semifricative
realisation of the same phoneme after c, z, and s.'

Alex Monaghan thought that Czech sounded as if it allowed voiced fricatives
to be syllabic (but not voiceless ones, and not stops). However, to the best
of my knowledge, descriptions of Czech restrict the set of syllabic
consonants to /l/, /r/ and marginally /m/.

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