It is not all downhill from here: Syllable Contact Law in Persian

Syllable contact pairs cross-linguistically tend to have a falling sonority slope, a constraint which is called the Syllable Contact Law (SCL). In this study, the phonotactics of syllable contacts in 4202 CVC.CVC words of Persian lexicon is investigated. The consonants of Persian were divided into five sonority categories and the frequency of all possible sonority slopes is computed both in lexicon (type frequency) and in corpus (token frequency). Since an unmarked phonological structure has been shown to diachronically become more frequent we expect to see the same pattern for syllable contact pairs with falling sonority slope. The correlation of sonority categories of the two consonants in a syllable contact pair is measured using Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) both in lexicon level and in corpus level. Results show that SCL is not a categorical constraint in Persian and all possible sonority slopes are observed. In addition evidence show that at lexical level, the less sonority slope (-4 to +4), the more frequent. The reason of frequency increase is shown to be the tendency of non-sonorants such as stops and fricatives to occur in onset position, their reluctance to occur in coda position and the tendency of sonorants such as nasals and liquids to occur in coda position rather than onset position. PMI between sonority categories of two consonants in a syllable contact pair provides evidence against SCL in Persian. In other words, the sonority categories don’t impose any restriction on each other and are not correlated. Higher frequencies of syllable contact pairs with falling sonority slope is not an effect of SCL but the effect of the constraints in coda position of the first syllable and the constraints in onset position of the second syllable.