New horizons of research on consonant clusters
Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Michał Jankowski, Piotr Wierzchoń, Paulina Zydorowicz, Paula Orzechowska, Dawid Pietrala
Based on the project Phonotactics and morphonotactics of Polish and English: description, tools and applications (N N104382540)
The description of Polish consonants and consonant clusters has been taken up in the literature, e.g., by Jassem 2003, Dunaj 1985, Dukiewicz and Sawicka 1995, Dobrogowska 1984, 1990, 1992 Wierzchowska 1971, 1980, and most extensively Bargiełówna 1950. The objective of this project is the formulation of a new and exhaustive description of the consonantal reality of the Polish language and its quantitative consonantal model. The novelty aspect of this project is the introduction of several original parameters of analysis and a study of samples of natural language of unprecedented size. The object of research is the consonant cluster viewed in terms of its morphology (derivation and inflection), size, position in a word and the linear order of the component phonemes.
The consonant sequences were extracted from three types of corpora: 1. a list of lemmas based on a 8K dictionary of “core” Polish, 2. a list of inflectional forms generated on the basis of standard paradigms for Polish nouns, adjectives and verbs, and 3. a list of over 500,000 inflectional forms derived from a collection of newspaper texts. The result is a list of approx. 1,500 Polish consonant clusters accompanied by statistical data.
Another area studied is the statistics of morphological boundaries cutting across consonantal clusters, with a view to showing possible differences between these morphonotactic clusters and the lexical ones, i.e. those that do not feature a morphological boundary (cf. Dressler and Dziubalska-Kolaczyk 2006). For example, the clusters /mpstf/, /jstf/, /fstf/, /ʨstf/ etc. all include the initial part of the suffix -stwo, which means that the clusters have a morphological boundary preceding the consonant /s/: /mp|stf/, /j|stf/, /f|stf/, /ʨ|stf/. Thus, those clusters are morphonotactic by default. By this analysis all clusters of Polish will be divided into those which are exclusively lexical, those which are exclusively morphonotactic and those which have either origin. It is predicted that the lexical clusters will be subject to phonological constraints to a much higher degree than the morphonotactic ones (cf. Dziubalska-Kolaczyk 2009, Zydorowicz 2010). The verification of this hypothesis will be conducted within the Beats-and-Binding model of phonotactics (B&B). The B&B operates with the Net Auditory Distance principle, which formulates universal well-formedness conditions for consonant clusters in all word positions. The model has an advantage over the traditional measure of markedness by means of sonority, namely, it takes into consideration such parameters as place of articulation and manner of articulation. This fine phonetic specification allows for more thorough evaluation of clusters.
It is hoped that the new methodology and approach will broaden the perspectives of research on phonotactics of Polish as well as other languages.
References
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