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Syllable

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syllable

A syllable is a sequence of speech sounds (formed from vowels and consonants) organized into a single unit. Syllables act as the building blocks of a spoken word, determining the pace and rhythm of how the word is pronounced.
The three structural elements of a syllable are the nucleus, the onset, and the coda.
Syllables can be structured several ways, but they always contain a nucleus, which is (usually) formed from a vowel sound. The nucleus is the core of the syllable, indicating its individual “beat” within a word; the number of syllables in a word will be determined by the number of vowel sounds forming their nuclei.
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Syllable

 

the minimal articulated unit of speech, consisting of one or several sounds that form a compact phonetic entity and that occur during one chest pulse. Proponents of various theories concerning the syllable believe that a syllable is produced by one muscular contraction, by modulation (narrowing and widening) of the pharynx, or by the degree of sonority and the order in which sounds are uttered.

A syllable is composed of a beginning (onset), a peak (nucleus), and a final part (coda). A peak is formed by simple vowels (ma-ma), by sonorants in some languages (Czech prst, “finger”), and occasionally by obstruents (psst!). A syllable’s beginning and end are formed by one or more consonants; in some languages a syllable may consist only of a peak (o-ni, “they”). Syllables are closed when they end in a consonant and open when they end in a vowel. They are uncovered when they begin with a vowel and covered when they begin with a consonant. The commonest syllable structure, found in all languages of the world, is consonant followed by vowel.

Division into syllables often does not correspond to division into morphemes. In the word ruchka (“handle”), morphemes for example, there are two syllables (ru-chka) but three morphemes (ruch-k-a). In syllabic languages, such as Chinese, morphemes are generally monosyllabic and syllable and morpheme boundaries coincide. In such languages, the beginning of a syllable is contrasted to its end, which is limited to certain permissible sounds.

V. A. VINOGRADOV

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
In other words, while Matic's principal claim that all decasyllabic epic songs about the Kosovo battle originated and existed solely in the Srem region is not very convincing, his arguments do question commonly held views that the folk songs celebrating Kosovo heroism and Lazar's commitment to the heavenly kingdom "have had huge audiences over the centuries." (14)
As well as fine texts of the two edited poems, Jean Blacker's edition includes a useful introduction, a translation into modern English of the decasyllabic version, a list of manuscript variants, a selective glossary, and indexes of proper names.
Only he can't tell an Alexandrine from a decasyllabic verse." He then punishes Doinel, an act that one preservice teacher interprets as follows: The teacher punishes Doinel in two ways.
JK: I used decasyllabics in those and some other poems (and other syllabics--in the first section of Domes, for instance) to keep my tendency towards pentameter in check.
Though we will be horrified when we remember the hard life that the protagonist, Nadezhda Mandelstam, was forced to lead, our predominant reaction to this verse play will be delight in Davenport's presentation, in unrhymed decasyllabic lines, of Mandelstam responding with wit and spirit to the younger party-line lunk who is the other actor in the drama.
Section C, "Petites Odes," contains no poems in alexandrines or decasyllabic lines.
But even if more space had been employed it would not have been feasible to represent the (roughly) decasyllabic lines as verse.
His satirical decasyllabic poem, Le mondain, sang the praises of the luxury and elegance of modern man and said that the primitive people had "long nails, rather black and grimy, and rather dishevelled hair".
Blank verse first appeared in Italian poetry of the Renaissance as an unrhymed variant of the endecasillabo, then was transplanted to England as the unrhymed decasyllabic or iambic pentameter ...
While maintaining the original ababbcbc rhyme scheme, the translator lengthens the octosyllabic lines of the French into decasyllabic lines in English, thereby providing a certain elasticity to the translation.
The strict formalism of Cluny's work-twelve decasyllabic twelve-line poems for the first part, "L'ete en Toscane," free verse for the second and longest part, "Arezzo: Fresques de Piero della Francesca," and thirteen decasyllabic thirteen-line poems for the third part, "Tombeaux etrusques"-indicates a concern for formal perfection, symmetry, order, and musicality.
The adult fairies, Oberon and Titania, speak in blank verse and in decasyllabic couplets, Oberon delivering his magic charms in octosyllabic trochaics; the other fairies speak in decasyllabic couplets, and in rhymed short verse ('eight and six'); the noblemen speak in blank verse, and in prose during the play scene; the lovers speak in blank verse and in decasyllabic couplets; while the mechanicals belong in prose but put on, for histrionic purposes, a range of verse forms as unexpected and as incompetently managed as their costumes and acting.
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