The Generative and the Structuralist Approach to the Syllable

Book excerpt: This book offers thorough analyses of two typologically different languages, English and Slovak, from the viewpoint of two different approaches to language: namely, structuralism, as introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure in the first half of the 20th century, and generativism, based on the ideas of Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar presented in the 1960s. Considering structuralist and generative phonology, the most important unit of phonological analysis for both is the syllable. Most of the theories within generative phonology provide a syllable model or rules for syllabification that are considered language-universal, but syllabification is not exhaustive since consonants that are part of a word but somehow violate the given syllable model or rules remain unsyllabified. On the other hand, in structuralist phonology, syllable theories fulfil the condition of universality such that all languages have syllables, and their syllabification is always exhaustive; that is, all segments in a word are syllabified. In this book, a generative understanding of the syllable is represented by the CVX syllable theory and the Syllable Structure Algorithm from Lexical Phonology, and the synthetic phonological theory was chosen to typify structuralism. As such, the book adds to current research bridging the gap between generative and structuralist linguistics.