Similar Place Avoidance in Slavic and Other Languages
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Journal of Slavic Linguistics |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | Plný text |
| Keywords | Obligatory Contour Principle; phonotactics; palatal; sonorant; coronal; sibilant; labial-coronal effect |
| Description | The paper discusses a constraint on the distribution of homorganic CVC sequences known as Similar Place Avoidance. Though proposed as a statistical universal, it has been little considered in Slavic and other Indo-European languages. We evaluate the CVC distribution in 100 record-ed and reconstructed varieties, of which 18 are Slavic, 44 are non-Slavic Indo-European, and 38 are non-IE. The SPA principle has been formulated as pertaining to CVC sequences of two con-sonants sharing the same place, but it has also been suggested that coronals are dependent on sonorancy agreement for the constraint to take effect. This dependency is indeed observable but concerns dento-alveolars only, not coronals as a whole class. SPA weakly restricts combinations of dento-alveolar sonorants with palatal sonorants. Combinations of different-place coronal ob-struents are disfavored, but this is instead due to sibilancy avoidance (a restriction of the co-occurrence of two sibilants in a CVC sequence, previously unreported). Finally, combinations of palatals (including post-alveolars) are less often subject to an SPA effect, and the Slavic lan-guages virtually lack this kind of restriction. |
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