ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters, although we occasionally made informal reference to concepts such as ‘open syllable’ or ‘closed syllable’, the syllable did not play any formal role. Chomsky and Halle, in their attempt to provide formal foundations for phonology, neglected the existing tradition of work on the syllable (eg Kuryɫowicz 1948; Pike and Pike 1947; Pike 1947, 1967), limiting their attention to strings of segment, their internal structure and operations on segments and features. In 4.4.1, it was pointed out that access to information about syllable boundaries (represented by $) improved matters since more perspicuous formulations of rules became possible. But there is a great deal of evidence that restricting ourselves to the position of segments in relation to syllable boundaries does not go far enough. The syllable needs to be recognized as a unit. As simple illustrations of this claim consider the following statements:
[1] Every Mazateco morpheme in its full form consists of bisyllabic sequences (Pike and Pike 1947).
[2] In Polish, stress is penultimate in words of more than one syllable (but monosyllables are stressed).
