ABSTRACT
This chapter first treats the structure of a syllable (Section 6.1), introducing the terms onset, nucleus, and coda as general names for the components. Every language has restrictions, or constraints, on how its phonemes can go together in sequences; some languages permit only consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV) etc. English has clusters of consonants which partly follow a scale of sonority, and these constraints are examined in Section 6.2.
