ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for a representation of the syllable in which there is internal constituent organisation. The syllable has had a rather chequered career in twentieth-century phonology. As a legacy of traditional ways of talking about language, it was on a par with the concept of word, and had to fight, for survival in a theoretically more parsimonious world. Normal practice amongst American descriptivists, for example, was to pass directly from the phoneme to the morpheme without seeking to set up or exploit any larger intermediate unit of phonological organisation. The evidence in support of constituent structure inside the syllable seems inescapably strong. An argument can be made from the need to recognise differences of grouping amongst elements of apparently similar, or even identical, phonetic composition. It is often the case that the 'weight' of the syllable for metrical purposes is calculable solely by reference to the components of the rhyme.
