ABSTRACT
In previous chapters we have examined sounds one at a time. We shall now turn to the groups and combinations into which sounds enter in connected speech. The smallest such group is the SYLLABLE. Since the concept of the syllable is a familiar and everyday one, it might be expected that linguists had long since agreed what the syllable is, and how and why sounds group themselves into syllables. In fact this is not so. The Swiss linguist de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics, which was first published in French in 1916, suggested that the syllable was based on the opening and closing of the vocal tract as the speaker moved from one sound to the next. This idea has an elegant simplicity which must be substantially correct. But as de Saussure himself pointed out, this basic idea does not account for all the patterns we might regard as syllables. We shall therefore start with the basic syllable and deal with the complications later.
