Prosodically-conditioned Syllable Structure in English

This paper investigates the interplay between the metrical structure and phonotactic complexity in English, a language with lexical stress and an elaborate inventory of consonant clusters. The analysis of a dictionary- and corpus-based list of polysyllabic words leads to two major observations. Firs...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Research in language 2019-06, Vol.17 (2), p.167-178
Main Authors: Orzechowska, Paula, Mołczanow, Janina, Jankowski, Michał
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Phonetics / Phonology
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper investigates the interplay between the metrical structure and phonotactic complexity in English, a language with lexical stress and an elaborate inventory of consonant clusters. The analysis of a dictionary- and corpus-based list of polysyllabic words leads to two major observations. First, there is a tendency for onsetful syllables to attract stress, and for onsetless syllables to repel it. Second, the stressed syllable embraces a greater array of consonant clusters than unstressed syllables. Moreover, the farther form the main stress, the less likely the unstressed syllable is to contain a complex onset. This finding indicates that the ability of a position to license complex onsets is related to its distance from the prosodic head.
ISSN:1731-7533
2083-4616
DOI:10.18778/1731-7533.17.2.04