Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-21T23:52:24.728Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Cross-linguistic trends in the frequency of CV sequences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2008

Tore Janson*
Affiliation:
University of Gothenburg

Abstract

The problem discussed is which CV sequences are generally favoured or disfavoured in the languages of the world, and the reasons for the trends. An investigation of relative frequencies of CV combinations in five languages is presented. The main result is that the favoured sequences are those in which there is no great movement of the articulatory organs from the consonant to the vowel. Examples are combinations of a dental consonant and a front vowel, and a velar consonant and a back vowel.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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.)

Footnotes

*

My thanks go first to John Ohala for his extensive and insightful comments on a previous version of this paper. Benny Brodda generously helped with the computer analysis. In the evaluation of the phonological systems and their relations to the orthographies of the languages, I was much helped by Birgit Nilsson (for Turkish) and Auskra Reinis (for Latvian).

References

Allen, W. Sidney (1978). Vox Latina: a guide to the pronunciation of Classical Latin. 2nd edn.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cole, Desmond, T. (1955). An introduction to Tswana grammar. Johannesburg: Longman.Google Scholar
Fennell, Trevor, G.Henry, Gelsen (1980). A grammar of modern Latvian. Vol. I. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Gamkrelidze, T. V. (1975). On the correlation of stops and fricatives in a phonological system. Lingua 35. 231261.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph, (1966). Language universals. In Sebeok, T. A. (ed.) Current trends in linguistics 3. The Hague: Mouton. 61112.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph, (1978). Some generalizations concerning initial and final consonant clusters. In Joseph, Greenberg (ed.) Universals of human language. Vol. 2: Phonology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 243279.Google Scholar
Karlsson, Fred, (1976). Finskans struktur. Lund: Liber.Google Scholar
Kawasaki, Haruko, (1982). An acoustical basis for universal constraints on sound sequences. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Lewis, G. L. (1967). Turkish grammar. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Lindblom, Björn, (1984). Can the models of evolutionary biology be applied to phonetic problems? In van der Broeke, M. P. R.Cohen, A. (eds.) Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Utrecht. Dordrecht: Foris. 6781.Google Scholar
Nartey, Jonas, (1979). A study in phonetic universals – especially concerning fricatives and stops. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 46.Google Scholar
Ohala, John, J.Haruko, Kawasaki (1984). Prosodic phonology and phonetics. Ph Y I. 113127.Google Scholar
Olli, John, B. (1958). Fundamentals of Finnish grammar. New York: Northland.Google Scholar
Sigurd, Bengt, (1968). Rank-frequency distribution for phonemes. Phonetica 18. 115.Google Scholar