What's in a Syllable?

What sorts of things are in a syllable? Let's take a simple example to start with: cat.

Let's take that one step further and use IPA to represent the word cat: .

It's not very hard to determine that has one syllable. In some varieties of English, the word cat is pronounced with two syllables, but that would have a different IPA representation. The pronunciation , however, has one syllable.

So, what's in it? Well, there's a , a , and a . If we simplify that a little, there is are two consonants with a vowel in the middle, or we have a CVC sequence, where C is a consonant, and V is a vowel.

Based on this, we know that a syllable can be composed of a consonant followed by a vowel, followed by a consonant.

What other structures can a single syllable have ? Think of different single syllable words.