Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T05:35:12.231Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Frequency of Consonant Clusters in French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2016

G. L. Bursill-Hall
G. L. Bursill-Hall*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In a recent article in Language, Sol Saporta pointed out that structural linguists had, for the most part, analysed sequences of phonemes but had ignored the frequencies of combinations. He goes on to produce an interesting and workable hypothesis, i.e. “the average frequency of a consonant cluster is a function of the difference between the phonemes in the cluster; low frequencies are expected for clusters which are either extremely similar or extremely dissimilar; high frequencies are expected for clusters which are at neither extreme.” What should be demonstrated by scholars of linguistics is that the frequency of these combinations is not haphazard.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , October 1956 , pp. 66 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association. 1956

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

(1) Saporta, S., “Frequency of Consonant Clusters”, Language 31.1 (1955), 25–30.Google Scholar
(2) Vander Beke, G. E., French Word Book, Publications of the American & Canadian Committees on Modern Languages, New York, 1929.Google Scholar
(3) Guiraud, P., Les Caractères statistiques du vocabulaire. Paris, 1954 (p. 25).Google Scholar
(4) Trnka, B., “General Laws of Phonemic Combinations”, TCLP VI (1936), 57–62.Google Scholar
(5) Jakobson, R., Fant, C.G.M. & Halle, M., Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and their Correlates. Cambridge, Mass., 1952.Google Scholar
(6) Troubetzkoy, N.S., Principes de Phonologie (Traduction J. Cantineau). Paris, 1949.Google Scholar
(7) Malécot, A., “The Elision of the French Mute-e within Consonantal Clusters”, Lingua V. 1 (1955), 45–60.Google Scholar
(8) Jakobson, R. & Lotz, J., “Notes on the French Phonemic Pattern”, Word V.2 (1949), 151-8.Google Scholar
(9) Fischer-Jørgensen, E., “On the Definition of Phoneme Categories on a Distributional Basis”, Acta Linguistica VII. 1-2 (1952), 8–39.Google Scholar
(10) Arnold, G., “A Phonological Approach to Vowel, Consonant and Syllable in Modern French”, Lingua V. 3(1956), 253–287.Google Scholar
(11) Halle, M., “The Strategy of Phonemics”, Word X. 2-3 (1954), 197–209.Google Scholar