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

10/03/2015

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by   Afshin Rahimi, et al.

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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