![]() Which does the mental grammar do? The onset is greedy, so it wants to take as many consonants as it can. So there are three logical possibilities for these middle consonants - they could both be the coda they could both be the onset or they could split the difference. The two vowels form the two nuclei of the syllables there’s no onset for the first syllable, and no coda for the second syllable. Let’s look at one more example to illustrate this idea that onsets are greedy. Of these four options, the one that has the greediest onset that is possible within English is this one: the is the coda of the first syllable, and the consonant cluster is the onset of the second syllable. It’s a principle of English grammar that words don’t begin with a cluster like, and neither do syllables. But it looks pretty weird, doesn’t it, to have a syllable start with ? A greedy onset takes as many consonants as it can within the grammar of that language. So this first option here has the greediest onset: it has the greatest number of consonants in an onset position. The principle that onsets are greedy means that an onset will take as many consonants as it can. What does the mental grammar do with these consonants? It could be that they all go in the coda of the first syllable, or they could be divided up between the coda of the first and the onset of the second, with a couple of possible permutations. It could be that all the consonants go in the onset of the second syllable. There are three consonants in the middle of this word, so there are four logical possibilities for how they could be organized. To see what that means, let’s look at a word that has a bunch of consonants in the middle, like emblem. There’s a systematic principle that operates in the mental grammar, which is that onsets are greedy. ![]() ![]() Well, it’s not random, and the mental grammar doesn’t just try to distribute consonants evenly. How does the mental grammar organize consonants in the middle of a multi-syllabic word? We could just as easily say that the first syllable has a coda cluster, or that the second syllable has an onset cluster. What about these two consonants in the middle? In the word raptor, the is the coda of the first syllable and is the onset of the second syllable, but there are other logical possibilities. The consonant at the beginning of the word is the onset of the first syllable, and the consonant at the end of the word is obviously the coda of the second syllable. How does it work with words that have more than one syllable, like raptor? It’s got two syllables, so it has two nuclei. Monosyllabic words are pretty straightforward. When there’s a group of consonants in the onset or coda we call them a cluster. There are three consonants before the nucleus, and they form the onset. Again, the vowel is the nucleus of this syllable, and the consonants that come after the nucleus form the coda. What about a single-syllable word that has more consonants in it? Let’s look at screens. And the occasional syllable has neither an onset nor a coda, just a nucleus, like the word I ! Some syllables have an onset but no coda, like the word day, and some syllables have a coda but not onset, like the word eat. The only part of a syllable that always has to be there is the nucleus. The consonant that comes after the vowel nucleus is the coda, and the consonant that comes before is the onset. The nucleus is the most sonorous part, so in this word, the vowel is the nucleus. We’ll start with a nice simple word like big. When we say a word is “monosyllabic” that just means that it has one syllable. Let’s look at how this works in some English words.
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