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Article published In:
The Syllable and its Prosody in Chinese
Edited by Lian-Hee Wee, Feng Wang and Yuan Liang
[Language and Linguistics 23:1] 2022
► pp. 82–115

Melodic-prosodic duality of the syllable

An application to Chinese

| The Education University of Hong Kong
| Hong Kong Baptist University
Implicit in all current theories of the syllable is some assumption of the internal configuration. Prevalent among these are the onset-rime (OR) and the moraic (μ) models, both supported by rather different types of evidence. The OR model favors an interpretation where constituency is exhaustive until the level of the segment which itself is a temporal unit with which melodic features associate. The μ-model distinguishes only what is non-moraic from what is moraic so that sub-syllabic constituency is an accidental result of projecting to/from the same mora. This paper postulates a more fundamental segment-melody complex that projects into two different dimensions: melody and prosody, thus capturing the insights of both the OR and μ-models through the separation of constituency issues with prosodic ones. This approach has direct applications in figuring out two long-standing conundrums in Chinese: the status of the medial glide and the prosodic properties of tonelessness. The segment-melody complex also predicts mismatches in moraicity and syllabicity as well as the mediating effect of the skeletal slots between the melodic root nodes and their moraic status.
Keywords: syllable, mora, foot, segment, feature, prosody
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Basic concepts in the models of syllables
    • 2.1Constituency
    • 2.2Prosodic weight
    • 2.3Melodic content and temporal ordering
    • 2.4Interim thoughts
  • 3.Two Chinese syllable difficulties
    • 3.1The status of the medial glide
    • 3.2Tonelessness and weight conundrum
  • 4.The segment-melody complex
    • 4.1The ambivalence of the medial glide
    • 4.2Tonelessness and prosody
  • 5.Moraicity versus syllabicity
    • 5.1Syllables of varying moraicity
    • 5.2Mediation effects of the skeletal slots
    • 5.3Moras of uncertain syllabicity
    • 5.4Moraic and syllabic ambivalence
    • 5.5Stress-related segmental processes
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 15 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00100.lia
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