Pervasive syllables and phonological unity in words

Abstract

In light of diachronic, synchronic, and psycholinguistic evidence, this paper shows that syllables are pertinacious units of speech in Korean and Turkish, which are characteristically syllable based. It is demonstrated that syllablebased generalizations in these languages not only shape morphophonological representations but also influence the way speech strings are perceived. Furthermore, they determine the fate of morphemes in diachronic change. Despite the primacy of syllables in these languages, it is also the case that they are replete with phonological regularities that are crucially linked to the word (and sometimes its syntactic category information), and exhibit static sound regularities that are asymmetrically distributed to word edges. The fact that several phonological phenomena in both Korean and Turkish blur morphological boundaries also comes with a caveat: The regularities simultaneously strive to achieve unity and coherence within prosodic units that are often larger than a lexical word in these languages. Accordingly, it is argued that such processes should be construed as a type of strengthening process since cohesion within a particular prosodic domain, presumably the Phonological Word, creates harmony and unity within that domain, thereby constituting vital signs of wordhood. On the basis of evidence from language processing, phonological unity that arises from regularities such as vowel harmony and stress is shown to facilitate word segmentation for the language user due to their demarcative function. It is suggested that the challenge in the delineation of wordand syllable-based generalizations, as well as evidence that seemingly contradicts the syllable vs. word rhythm typology, are due to crosslinguistic differences concerning the nature of words, as well as the pivotal role prosodic domains and the prosodic hierarchy play in organizing speech units.