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

TL;DR

This study investigates the phonotactics of syllable contact pairs in Persian, analyzing sonority slopes across thousands of words to understand the prevalence of the Syllable Contact Law and its diachronic implications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of sonority slopes in Persian syllable contacts, applying corpus and lexicon data to test phonotactic constraints and diachronic patterns.

Findings

Falling sonority slopes are more frequent in Persian syllable contacts.

A positive correlation exists between sonority categories of consonants in syllable pairs.

The results support the diachronic increase of unmarked phonological structures.

Abstract

Syllable contact pairs crosslinguistically 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 CVCCVC 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