syllable n
a unit of speech consisting minimally of one vowel and maximally of a
vowel preceded by a consonant or consonant cluster and followed by a con-
sonant or consonant cluster. For example, the English word introductions
consists of four syllables: in-tro-duc-tions.
In phonetics, the syllable is often related to chest pulses, contractions of
chest muscles accompanied by increased air pressure, to sonority, the loud-
ness of a sound relative to that of other sounds with the same length, stress,
and pitch, or prominence, a combination of sonority, length, stress, and pitch.
In phonology, the syllable is defined by the way in which vowels and
consonants combine to form various sequences. Vowels can form a syllable
on their own (e.g. oh!) or they can be the “centre” of a syllable, preceded
or followed by one or more consonants, e.g. bay, ate, bait. Syllables that
end in a vowel are open syllables, e.g. the first syllables in English open,
highway, even; syllables that end in one or more consonants are closed
syllables, e.g. the first syllables in English magpie, pantry, completion.
A syllable can be divided into three parts:
a the beginning, called the onset
b the central part, called the nucleusor peak
c the end, called the codaor final.
In the English word bite, / bayt /, /b/ is the onset, /ay/ the nucleus, and /t / the
coda.
see also syllabic consonant
syllable-timed language n
a language (such as Spanish) with a rhythm in which syllables tend to occur
at regular intervals of time and the length of an utterance depends on the
number of syllables rather than the number of stresses.
see also stress-timed language
syllabus n
alsocurriculum
a description of the contents of a course of instruction and the order in
which they are to be taught. Language-teaching syllabuses may be based on
different criteria such as (a) grammatical items and vocabulary (see struc-
tural syllabus) (b) the language needed for different types of situations
(see situational method) (c) the meanings and communicative functions
which the learner needs to express in the target language^1 (see notional
syllabus) (d) the skills underlying different language behaviour or (e) the
text types learners need to master.
see also curriculum^2 , gradation, languages for special purposes,
spiral approach, synthetic approach
syllable