the university of chicago the phonology and ... - SIL International

5.1 Syllable types
In Mono, there are two unambiguous syllable patterns: CV and V. The CV
syllable type is generally considered to be a typological universal (Burquest 1998: 150), 1
perhaps because of the perceptual salience of the release portion of a consonant (Ohala &
Kawasaki 1984), so its presence in Mono is to be expected. The V syllable type has a
limited distribution, only occurring unambiguously in word-initial position in Mono.
However, word-initial onsetless syllables are cross-linguistically very common (Burquest
1998: 154), so its presence in Mono is also unproblematic. There are no cases of syllable-
final consonants in Mono.
Several ambiguous syllable types occur in Mono. These include CGV (G = glide,
or semi-vowel), CV1V2 (where V1 ≠ V2), CV, and CLV (L = liquid).
The first ambiguous syllable type is CGV. This pattern is discussed in detail in
Chapter 4 with respect to labialization and palatalization. Distributional restrictions limit
the segments which precede and follow the semi-vowel in these syllables. Velar and
glottal consonants (, C, C C, C C , and D) may precede both semi-vowels (w and j), and in
rare cases , , and precede . With a few exceptions discussed in Chapter 4, the semi-
vowels in this position always precede the vowel a. The fact that the semi-vowels co-
occur mostly with stop consonants and the low vowel a is not surprising. These
phonemes represent the extremes of the sonority hierarchy. As Goldsmith (1990: 111)
points out, “[L]anguages may...require that the differences in sonority between adjacent
segments be greater than a certain amount.” If a language allows only a radically reduced
set of three-segment syllables, it seems reasonable to expect that the initial and final
segments should be limited to those found at the extremes of the sonority hierarchy. One
possible explanation for the lack of labial and coronal stops in the onset of such syllables
1
See Breen & Pensalfini (1999) for a possible counter-example to this claim in the Australian
language Arrernte.
71