non-syllabicadj.n.

1864 J. Manning in Trans. Philol. Soc. 1 The ear distinguishes between possessive arguments which are syllabic and those which may be designated as temporal, being non-syllabic.

1895 Mod. Lang. Notes 10 34/2 It is still an unsettled question whether the syllabic and the non-syllabic sounds of l, for example, differ from one another.

1933 L. Bloomfield Lang. vii. 120 Some of the phonemes are more sonorous than the phonemes (or the silence) which immediately precede or follow... Any such phoneme is a crest of sonority or a syllabic; the other phonemes are non-syllabic.

1961 R. B. Long Sentence & its Parts xvii. 382 Such monosyllabic complexes employing nonsyllabic suffixes as truth and fourth.

1992 R. D. Fulk Hist. Old Eng. Meter i. 67 The metathesis in forms of OE ādl, setl, mæþl, and botl..seems to require nonsyllabic l.

2000 S. Franks & T. H. King Handbk. Slavic Clitics 35 The nonsyllabic preposition v ‘in’ has a special allomorph va before bound pronouns.

1939 S. Bradley in Amer. Lit. Jan. 443 The connection of such a line with the long tradition of English nonsyllabic, or ‘periodic’, rhythm, will be made clearer.

1957 H. Whitehall in N. Frye Sound & Poetry 143 The first distinction would be drawn between syllabic and non-syllabic rhythms.

1979 T. Pearce Literary Amer. 1903–34 iv. 160 The verse form is nonsyllabic meter based upon the chief accents which create rhythmic cadences.

1890 H. Sweet Primer of Phonetics §150 Hence the ear learns to divide a breath-group into groups of vowels..each flanked by consonants..or, in other words, into syllable-formers or syllabics, and non-syllabics, each of these groups constituting a syllable.

1933 L. Bloomfield Lang. vii. 120 Thus the [e] in red and the [r] in bird are syllabics, but the [r] in red and the [d] in red and bird are non-syllabics.

1965 Language 41 476 According to their function in the syllable, the consonants are non-syllabics or syllabics.

1994 E. E. Tyrone Res. Methodol. Second-lang. Acquisition 162 A..detailed discussion of the phonetic and phonological constraints on marking of regular nonsyllabics.