Theories on syllable formation and division

Types of transcription

Transcription is a linguistics term used to describe the representation of spoken language in a written form. For our project we distinguish two different types of transcriptions:

1. Word transcripts: human transcribers produce a full word-by-word transcript but not a segmentation of the audio. This word transcription can contain additional information such as speaker identification, speech changes, change of topic, untranscribed words, etc but no timeinformation.

Time-segmented transcripts: human transcribers segment the audio file into small audio clips (usually to reflect a change of speaker, a new sentence, etc) and transcribe each of these clips individually with the most appropriate sentence. Using this approach a human transcriber can segment the audio file into small audio clips and then transcribe each of these small audio clips. Segmenting the audio file reduces the complexity of the transcription of large audio files. At the same time, segmenting the audio file into smaller clips is a way of synchronizing the audio with the transcription at sentence or speaker level.

Types of transcription

According to, the following main kinds of trasncription can be distinguished:

1. recording script;

2. orthographic transcription;

3. morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic representations;

4. citation-phonemic representation;

5. broad phonetic or phonotypic transcription;

6. narrow phonetic transcription;

7. acoustic-phonetic transcription;

8. physical transcription;

9. prosodic transcription;

10. non-linguistic and other phenomena.

Theories on syllable formation and division

11.The syllable is a complicated phenomenon and like a phoneme it can be studied on four levels - articulatory, acoustic, auditory andfunctional

12. The theory of syllable put forward by O. Jespersen is generally called the sonority theory. According to O. Jespersen, each sound is characterized by a certain degree of sonority which is understood us acoustic property of a sound that determines its perceptibility. According to this sound property a ranking of speech sounds could be established: <the least sonorous> voiceless plosives à voiced fricatives àvoiced plosives à voiced fricatives à sonorants à close vowels àopen vowels <the most sonorous>. In the word plant for example we may use the following wave of sonority: [pla:nt]. According to V.A. Vasssilyev the most serious drawback of this theory is that it fails to explain the actual mechanism of syllable formation and syllable division. It is perfectly obvious that no phonetician has succeeded so far in giving an adequate explanation of what the syllable is. The difficulties seem to arise from the various possibilities of approach to the unit. There exist two points of view:

13. 1. Sоme linguists consider the syllable to be a purely articulatory unit which lacks any functional value. This point of view is defended on the ground that the boundaries of syllables do not always coincide with those of morphemes.

14. 2. However the majority of linguists treat the syllable as the smallest pronounceable unit which can reveal some linguistic function.

15. Trying to define the syllable from articulatory point of view we may talk about universals. When we mean the functional aspect of the syllable it should be defined with the reference to the structure of one particular language.

16. The definition of the syllable from the functional point of view tends to single out the following features of the syllable:

17. a) a syllable is a chain of phonemes of varying length;

18. b) a syllable is constructed on the basis of contrast of its constituents (which is usually of vowel - consonant type);

19. c) the nucleus of a syllable is a vowel, the presence of consonants is optional; there are no languages in which vowels are not used as syllable nuclei, however, there are languages in which this function is performed by consonants;

20. d) the distribution of phonemes in the syllabic structure follows by the rules which are specific enough for a particular language.

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