Phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet

§ Prosodic stress
 below.
Phonotactics
is the study of the sequences of phonemes that occur in languages and the
sound structures that they form. In this study it is usual to represent consonants in general
Phonotactics

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with the letter C and vowels with the letter V, so that a syllable such as 'be' is described as
having CV structure. The 
IPA
symbol used to show a division between syllables is the dot [.].
Syllabification is the process of dividing continuous speech into discrete syllables, a process
in which the position of a syllable division is not always easy to decide upon.
Most languages of the world syllabify CVCV and CVCCV sequences as /CV.CV/ and
/CVC.CV/ or /CV.CCV/, with consonants preferentially acting as the onset of a syllable
containing the following vowel. According to one view, English is unusual in this regard, in
that stressed syllables attract following consonants, so that ˈCVCV and ˈCVCCV syllabify as /
ˈCVC.V/ and /ˈCVCC.V/, as long as the consonant cluster CC is a possible syllable coda; in
addition, /r/ preferentially syllabifies with the preceding vowel even when both syllables are
unstressed, so that CVrV occurs as /CVr.V/. This is the analysis used in the 
Longman
Pronunciation Dictionary
.
[74]
 However, this view is not widely accepted, as explained in the
following section.