Open AccessProsodically-conditioned Syllable Structure in English
Author(s) -
Paula Orzechowska,
Janina Mołczanow,
Michał Jankowski
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
research in language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.165
H-Index - 9
eISSN - 2083-4616
pISSN - 1731-7533
DOI - 10.18778/1731-7533.17.2.04
Subject(s) - phonotactics , syllable , stress (linguistics) , linguistics , consonant cluster , consonant , speech recognition , head (geology) , psychology , computer science , phonology , geology , philosophy , vowel , geomorphology
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.