Literary applications of syllable constituents

Recognizing the onset and rhyme does not only allow us to write more accurate versions of our phonological rules, and to understand alternations between sounds which arise when we add an affix or combine words into longer strings, thus creating different syllabifications. These two constituents are also integral parts of two rather different literary traditions. In alliterative poetry, the important constituent is the onset, which must be identical in several words in a single line (and often, the more the better). An example from the Scots poetic tradition appears in (9); this is a short excerpt from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century ‘Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie’. A flyting is essentially a long string of insults, here hurled by each of the poets named in the title at the other, in turn. The use of alliteration, which is clear even from the two lines given, extends throughout the fairly lengthy poem.

It is clear that almost all of the words in the first line begin with/k/, and those in the second with/t/; and in some cases, here cocatrice, intemperate, the alliterating sound may appear in word-internal onset positions too. More obviously, or at least more familiarly, the rhyme of the syllable determines poetic rhyme: for a perfect rhyme, the nucleus and coda (if any) must be exactly the same, though whether there is an onset or not, or what it is, does not matter. That is, meet rhymes with eat, and with beat, and with sweet; but it does not rhyme with might or mate, where the nucleus is different; or with bee, where there is no coda; or with leek or beast, where there is a coda, but not one consisting of the single consonant /t/.