Syllabic consonants

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:50 PM -0500 2/28/09, Geoffrey Nathan wrote:
>I will break my vow here not to enter into discussions with Mr. Z,
>but his comment
>
>>Syllabic "l" is not a good concept. A syllable needs a vowel.
>>  Also if you add a suffix you might need that vowel.
>>For instand cannibalize. It's not pronounced cannablize.
>>  But a "syllabic l" would wipe out the vowel that is necessary
>>  there. Syllabic l is bad concept that is worthless.
>
>is insulting to Czech speakers living in Brno (syllabic trilled
>rhotic) and those who speak Srpski (Serbian), not to mention those
>who live in Plzen (syllabic lateral approximant) or drink the
>'Plsner' that comes from there.  Not to mention all American English
>speakers who have syllabic [n]'s in 'button' [bV?n,] (V=caret;
>,=syllabic marker under n).  Then there's Tamazight Berber with
>syllabic f's and even t's:         /tf`tk`ts`tt/   `you sprained it'
>(http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~jcoleman/TPS.html).
>And, of course, there is a contrast between syllabic [l,] and
>non-syllabic [l] in cases such as the famous pair 'coddling'
>(treating with kid gloves) and 'codling' (baby cod).  M-W, for
>example, illustrates this contrast (and no, I'm not making a
>substantive claim about the phonemes of English here--I suspect
>there's actually an underlying schwa there, but as with all
>sonorants, the coda spreads into the nucleus in unstressed
>syllables.)
>
>Geoff
>
Another example:

lightning (across the sky) vs. lightening (sky)

and for some speakers

interesting (adj.) vs. interesting (present participle, as in "That
is interesting me")

LH

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