Questioning the universality of the syllable: evidence from Japanese

International audienceThis paper reexamines the issue of the mora, the foot and the syllable in Tokyo Japanese, and shows that whereas the mora and the foot are indisputably present and active, the evidence for the syllable is inconspicuous and disputable. Building on this observation, I claim that Tokyo Japanese makes no use of the syllable. Instead, two types of mora are distinguished : regular CV moras and weak (deficient) moras. Weak moras include the moraic nasal, the first part of a geminate and the second part of a long vowel, as well as moras containing an onsetless vowel, a devoiced vowel or an epenthetic vowel. I further argue that feet obey a set of structural constraints stipulating that they be properly headed by a regular full mora. With this enriched notion of mora type, the paper argues that neither the syllable nor any other level of the prosodic hierarchy is obligatory in all languages. The fact that the Japanese foot consists of morae rather than syllables points to the independence of the mora as a phonological constituent. It also poses a problem for advocates of the position that morae are sub-constituents of syllables, since the boundaries of feet, composed of morae, need not coincide with syllable boundaries. (Poser 1990 : 103) A veteran and witness of many of the changes that had affected phonological theory (including excesses), although the syllable had previously been maligned in generative phonology, I was struck in the early 1980s by how all was forgiven. Everyone loved the syllable