THE ROLE OF DISTINCTIVE FEATURES IN THE STRUCTURE OF THE SYLLABLE. A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND SLOVAK

Abstract

The placement of the syllable boundary in consonant clusters occurring word-medially is a perennial problem in phonological theory. The comprehension of the syllable as the “smallest binding unit of language” (Pauliny 1979: 101), as the unit necessary for the understanding of the phonological structure of the language, enables us to determine the boundaries of syllables on the basis of contrasts between the neighbouring phonemes in the syllable. The degree of contrast depends on the distinctive features of the given phonemes. To evaluate this approach, distinctive features of phonemes from two different languages – English and Slovak – were delimited according to two distinctive features theories – Feature Geometry and synthetic phonological theory. The sample analysis of the English and the Slovak words with word-medial consonant clusters indicates the validity of this approach for the demarcation of the syllable boundary in polysyllabic words.