Preferences and variation in word-initial phonotactics: A multi-dimensional evaluation of German and Polish

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to discuss phonotactic constraints that govern the formation of word-initial consonant clusters in two different languages, German and Polish, and to establish a general procedure for a rank-ordering of clusters. The description of clusters is based on corpus and dictionary data. We define several dimensions in cluster description, namely (i) complexity of clusters, (ii) place of articulation, (iii) manner of articulation and (iv) voicing of segments, for which a total of 15 parameters is derived, each expressing a structural preference for cluster formation true to various degrees in the two languages. These preferences can be seen in part as extensions of the frequently used measure of sonority based mainly on manner of articulation features, and can be considered to provide a more detailed description of clusters than one based on sonority. In addition, a cluster analysis for the two sets of clusters lends support to the conclusions on the fundamental difference between Polish and German word-initial phonotactics. For each cluster, values obtained for every parameter are summed up to calculate an empirically justified rank ordering of the clusters in both languages.