Single syllable breakdown of the word strawberry in IPA

Question

My intro linguistics class was doing a demonstration of how to break up single syllables into their vowel trees. We came up with three different interrpretations and were looking for more opinions.

For the word strawberry we concluded that in our collective English dialects it would most likely be spelled as [stɹa/ɔbɛɹi], with some variation between the vowel [a] or [ɔ]. Where we ran into trouble was where to break up the syllables. We all agreed it had three syllables.

One group thought it was broken up as [stɹa/ɔ] [bɛ] [ɹi]. Broken down as [stɹ] as the onset to [a/ɔ], [bɛ] with [b] as the onset to the rhyme [ɛ], and [ɹi] with the onset of [ɹ] of the rhyme [i].

One group thought it was [stɹa/ɔ] [bɛɹ] [i] with [stɹ] as the onset to [a/ɔ], [b] as the onset of the nucleus [ɛ] with a coda of [ɹ], and [i] as a separate nucleus.

And one group thought it was [stɹa/ɔ] [bɛɹ] [ɹi] with [stɹ] as the onset to [a/ɔ], [b] as the onset of the nucleus [ɛ] with a coda of [ɹ], and [ɹ] as the onset of the rhyme [i].

Here is a illustration for further clarification.

Any insights would be appreciated!

Answer 1

There is a gap in the theories, precisely for this kind of "ambisyllabic" case. So stepping outside of the theories, I would consider the answer of Group 3 to be most reflective of the way English is actually spoken.

English syllables do prefer onsets when available, so here perhaps the 3rd syllable has borrowed or pulled on the coda consonant of the 2nd syllable to create an onset for itself, yet the 2nd syllable does not lose its coda. Or perhaps conversely, since the vowel of the 2nd syllable /ɛ/ is a lax vowel and English lax vowels prefer a syllable with a coda, the 2nd syllable has pulled a coda for itself from the onset of the 3rd syllable. The fact that the English orthography uses two "R"s is consistent with this. (The theories might perhaps need to be expanded to include a shared or dual-duty Consonant???)

Attempting to pronounce the word "strawberry" according to solution 1 or solution 2 does not result in a natural sounding utterance. When I coach non-native speakers of English on pronunciation, I tell them to use the consonant for both syllables, and when they do that, their pronunciation becomes much more natural sounding.

Answer 2

The answer depends on what principles you assume must be in Universal Grammar. The three groups arrived at all of the analyses posited for English: coda-only, onset-only and both coda and onset. This is regardless of there being a rhyme constituent. If you make it obligatory as a matter of theory for there to be an onset if a consonant is available, then it must be an onset. If you forbid segments appearing in two syllables, that rules out the ambisyllabic analysis 3ˊ.

Group 3 posits a "deviant" variant of the ambisyllabic treatment where you have two separate r segments, which nobody posits (instead, the single segment is in two positions). Insofar as English does not have sequences of identical segments within a morpheme, we can rule that analysis out. In general, there has to be some solution to the analysis of VCV, regardless of what the consonant is. Based on the facts of flapping, we can conclude that analysis 3 is wrong, but a variant with ambisyllabic 3 could still be right because that segment remains "intervocalic".

There are many subtle phonological facts (discussed in Kahn 1976) which point to apparently syllable-based treatments, but it has also been shown that reference to the stress foot adequately accounts for those facts, and that syllable structure is not necessary for all of the facts. Phonologists thus generally conclude that there are no compelling phonological arguments that argue for a specific syllable-related structure, instead, the analysis follows from some theoretical premise.