Correct syllabification in (American) English

Question

I need to figure out what the proper syllabification of words in American English is and why. PLEASE NOTE: I am interested in syllabification from a phonetic point of view, not in terms of hyphenation/spelling.

Dictionary.com (Random House) and Cambridge dictionary give those transcriptions:

• very /ˈvɛr.i/
• city /ˈsɪt.i/
• syllable /ˈsɪl.ə.bəl/

Meanwhile, syllabify from Penn Phonetics Toolkit (P2TK) gives those:

• very /ˈvɛ.ri/
• city /ˈsɪ.ti/
• syllable /ˈsɪ.lə.bəl/

They do agree on "people" /ˈpipəl/ for example, though.

This leaves me with the following questions:

1. Which set of transcriptions is correct and why? (Or are they both acceptable?)
2. How do native speakers typically conceive those syllables? (Do they hear a distinction between one syllabification and the other?)

Background: I'm working on a webapp and training using modern linguistics to help in teaching ESL. (Key features are a focus on sound and the systematic use of IPA transcriptions.) I can see how /ˈvɛr.i/ would help in putting more emphasis on the stressed syllable, meanwhile foreigners thinking of it as /ˈvɛ.ri/ might lead to people giving too much intensity to the unstressed syllable -- but that's just my take on it. I'd like to find out how native speakers think this and what professional linguists make of it.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there is no straightforward syllabification method that is accepted by a majority of linguists. As you pointed out, different dictionaries provide different syllabification methods. Usually, syllabification is considered from a phonological point of view (a phonetic perspective is possible but less common, see below).

Most linguistics can agree that (in English) the nucleus ("core") of a syllable must be vowel (an exception is made for nasals in certain contexts). If we consider a word with more than one syllable, the next question is whether the consonant(s) between the first and the second nucleus should belong to the first or the second syllable.

Example: Should /r/ in very belong to the first, hence /ˈvɛr.i/, or the second syllable /ˈvɛ.ri/

The maximum onset principle (MOP)

The MOP says that as many consonants as possible should belong to the second syllable (i.e., the onset of the following syllable should be maximised). What is possible is determined by the phonology of English. For example, there are words like 'road' that begin with an /r/. Hence, we know that /r/ is a possible onset. Therefore, /ˈvɛ.ri/ is the correct syllabification.

Exceptions to the MOP

Some linguists think there should be exceptions to the MOP. For example, one opinion is that stressed syllables must not have an empty coda. This would mean that /ˈvɛr.i/ is preferred.

Another opinion is that lax vowels such as /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ must not have an empty coda (because there are no words ending in a lax vowel). This would mean that 'hippy' should be syllabified as /'hɪp.i/, not /'hɪ.pi/. Yet another analysis is that (as musicallinguist mentioned) some consonants can be ambisyllabic, i.e. belong to both the preceding and the following syllable.

Conclusion

There are different syllabification methods, and none of them is universally accepted (also, we have only talked about English here). You say you are interested in syllabification from a phonetic point of view (but your description of the question was in phonological terms).

P.S.: Phonetic syllabification

This is also possible. Basically, intensity peaks (which are very loud) are syllable nuclei, and intensity troughs (which are very soft) are syllable boundaries (if the loudness difference reaches a certain minimal threshold). But this will likely not help you address your pedagogical concerns.

Answer 2

The dirty little secret of English is that syllable boundaries mostly do not matter (unlike other languages). What is important is the syllable nuclei which are easily identified either as the vowel or a syllabic consonant (such as / n / in 'sudden'.)

As @robert says, the Onset Maximization Principle is most commonly adopted when trying to determine which consonants belong to the nucleus. This principles states, that all things being equal, consonants should belong to the start of the syllable.

However, this principle is subject to a number of phonotactic constraints. Such as a prohibition of a short stressed open syllable. These constraints are generally derived from what is observed in monosyllabic words (because we know those are possible) as well as from an attempt to have a system that is consistent.

This latter aim lead the phonetician John Wells to offer an alternative syllabification principle, stated thus:

(1) Subject to certain conditions, consonants are syllabified with the more strongly stressed of two flanking syllables.

(2) Where adjacent syllables are of equal grade, consonants are (again subject to stated conditions) syllabified with the leftward syllable.

This might lead to violations of certain phonotactic principles such as syllabifying 'limber' as limb/er. But mb is not possible in English as a syllable-final cluster, so the syllabification is lim/ber. And so on.

As a result, the two main pronunciation dictionaries of English (Cambridge and Longman) both use a very different syllabification pattern.

Personally, I feel that the Onset Maximization Principle is more often in consonance with native speaker intuitions (although I don't have the literature to back it up) and would also be more beneficial to non-native speakers because it results in syllables with simpler clusters. E.g. 'hospital' is more helpful as 'hos-pi-tal' than 'hosp-i-tal'.

Answer 3

I think it's very clear that a single intervocalic consonant before an unstressed vowel goes in the preceding syllable. The earliest reference I know of is a paper in Language by James Hoard in 1971. The title was "Aspiration, Tenseness, and Syllabication in English". That they go in the preceding syllable is David Stampe's view in his paper "Divinity Fudge" (CLS) and my and Irwin Howard's view in "Another Mouthful of Divinity Fudge" (CLS).

A sort of half-way version of this idea became popular in the 70s on the East Coast, which was that such consonants are ambisyllabic. Why place them in the second syllable as well as the first? I was never able to discern any reasoning behind this at all. I guess, something like "Well, everyone thinks they go in the second syllable, and now I find evidence they go in the first, so, duh, they must be in both syllables."

The reason those consonants so often get put in the second syllable in dictionaries and elsewhere is apparently the way people say things when they sound them out, syllable by syllable. "City" is "ci-" plus "ty". But when you say the syllables one by one, you stress all the vowels, and of course that changes the syllabification, so that now, those consonants go with the following syllable.

The evidence that such consonants go in the previous syllable has to do with the preference of various lenitory processes for applying to syllable offset consonants. Flapping is the most obvious case, where you find intervocalic t/d/n flapping at the end of a word regardless of whether the following vowel is stressed, but within a word, flapping only before a stressless vowel. But lots of stuff works that way. Syllable offset r in English loses its roundness in "very", e.g. Syllable offset "y" is palatal, but syllable onset "y" is palato-alveolar. In casual speech, intervocalic syllable offset k/g can lenite to fricatives, while syllable onset k/g are immune.

I know you said you're not interested in spelling, but it's amusing that Donald Knuth discussing hyphenation (in the TeXBook, I think) remarks that the verb "re-cord" hyphenates differently from the noun "rec-ord".

Answer 4

City is ambi-syllabic in /t/. Rapid has an ambi-syllabic /p/, but not the /b/ in rabid, which is actually ra-bid. Watcher has an ambi-syllabic /t/. The /p/ in apple straddles the phonetic boundary between the first and second syllables. Petrol should not be syllabified as pe.trol (Merriam Webster), pet.rol (Cambridge), or petr.ol (Longman). To achieve the implicit assumption that the written syllable must match the heard syllable in a one-to-one manner, we need to claim that /t/ is ambi-syllabic.