The Shadow Area: A Contrastive Review of the Syllabic Template and Syllabification in English and Fawi Arabic

Abstract

The syllable is thought of as the fundamental unit in the description of prosodic systems of languages and in verse forms based on prosodic patterns. The phonemic description of a language is not only complete if it is confined only to establish the phoneme inventory and to examine the distinctive features of its members. But, the phonemic description should also account for the phonemic combinations that occur or that may be expected to occur in the language. The present study aims at investigating the syllable and syllable templates in English and Fawi Arabic. It contributes to give more phonological facts and information about the syllable templates, syllabification and types of syllables in both dialects.