Linguistic units

A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (margins, which are most often consonants). In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language: its prosody or poetic metre. Properties such as stress, tone, and reduplication operate on syllables and their parts. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for exa

elementary constituent segment within a text

in generative grammar, the theory of syntactic category formation that ① phrases may contain intermediate constituents projected from a head X; and that ② this system of projected constituency may be common to more than one category (e.g. N, V, A, P)

smallest temporally discrete unit identifiable in speech

thumb|upright=1.35|Vowel lip shapes in a 1919 lip reading manual

unit of syntax and morphology

A tagmeme is the smallest functional element in the grammatical structure of a language. The term was introduced in the 1930s by the linguist Leonard Bloomfield, who defined it as the smallest meaningful unit of grammatical form (analogous to the morpheme, defined as the smallest meaningful unit of lexical form). The term was later adopted, and its meaning broadened, by Kenneth Pike and others beginning in the 1950s, as the basis for their tagmemics.