Combinations of segments in a language are subject to co-occurrence restrictions. This paper focuses on phonotactic constraints that govern the formation of word-initial consonant clusters in German. A description of the inventory of clusters results in scales of phonotactic preferability and a novel approach to a ranking of onset clusters. A set of structural preferences for clusters can be es...

Of course, if (2) holds, (1) and (3) are equivalent – but there might well be languages where (2) turns out to be false, but the other two statements are true. In fact, every language where consonant clusters are disallowed as codas but permitted as onsets is a counterexample to (2), and the same holds for those languages that allow complex codas but do not allow complex onsets. Before turning ...

Sonority is a property of segments that relates to phonotactics and syllable shape but whose nature remains in dispute. Clements (1990) uses this property to define the order that segments may occur in a syllable in what he calls the sonority sequencing principle (SSP), which says that “between any member of a syllable and the syllable peak, only sounds of higher sonority rank are permitted.” H...

The sonority principle is dramatically violated by some Russian onset clusters (e.g., [lba]) and not by others. Russian onset clusters therefore provide a good test of a phoneticallymotivated, alternative hypothesis to the sonority hierarchy; namely, the hypothesis that the primary constraint on the sequential organization of segments is the relatively independent close-open mandibular cycle. T...

Prosodic Weight* Draga Zec Cornell University Introduction Syllable weight has been standardly characterized in terms of subsyllabic constituency, and computed by making reference to mora count, as argued in Hyman 1984, McCarthy and Prince 1986 and Hayes 1989, among others.1 Certain recent proposals, however, posit additional syllable weight distinctions, based on the sonority of the nucleus (e...

Jespersen’s sonority hierarchy fails to account for commonly observed syllable structures such as initial [spV], [stV] and [skV] and their final mirror images [Vps], [Vts] and [Vks]. It is likely, however, that stop place of articulation is signaled quite efficiently in these sequences since acoustic place information is present both before and after the stop, i.e., both in [s] and in the vowel...