Sonority Sequencing Violations and Prosodic Structure in Latin and Other Indo-European Languages

Abstract

Attention has been paid of late to syllable structure in ancient Indo-European languages, e.g. Sanskrit (Kobayashi, 2004), Latin (Marotta, 1999), Greek (Zukoff, 2012), Anatolian (Kavitskaya, 2001), and general Indo-European (Byrd, 2010; Keydana, 2012). There is little agreement in the field about some of the more difficult cases, most of which involve both word-initial and medial clusters that violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), particularly sibilant-stop clusters. Because sibilants are more sonorous than stops, [STV-] σ onsets to roots such as *steh2- require special consideration. I will argue that there are three types of evidence we can and should employ in attempting to diagnose syllable structure in ancient languages: metrical, phonological, and morphological. I will apply all three to Latin forms, showing that in Pre-Literary Latin, sibilant-stop clusters formed true onsets, as Byrd (2010) has argued for Proto-Indo-European, but that by the Classical period these SSP-violating clusters were no longer licensed as onsets. In such sequences, Classical Latin allowed only [t] in the onset, while the [s] formed a coda in medial position and was housed extraprosodically in word-initial position. The various treatments of ST-sequences in Latin and other Indo-European languages, especially PIE, Sanskrit, and Gothic, will be modeled in Optimality Theory using constraints on phonotactics and extraprosodicity.

MUST&P-SRL: Multi-lingual and Unified Syllabification in Text and Phonetic Domains for Speech Representation Learning

“…Vowels have the highest sonority, followed by approximants (such as /r/ and /w/), fricatives, nasals, and finally stops, which have the lowest sonority. The linguistic literature identified exceptions to this principle, the main one being probably the sibilant-stop consonant cluster (Iacoponi and Savy, 2011;Yin et al, 2023;DeLisi, 2015). Implementations of the principle with processing of these exceptions been successfully applied for automatic syllabification in several languages in the pronunciation domain with very high word accuracies (Bigi et al, 2010;Bigi and Petrone, 2014;Bigi and Klessa, 2015).…”

The Sonority Sequencing Principle and the Structure of Slovak Consonant Clusters

“…Similarly, it seems that Russian syllables do not obey the SSP either, as reported by O'Brien (O'Brien, 2006). The SSP is violated in many other (not only Slavic) languages (see, for example, DeLisi, 2015;Engstrand & Ericsdotter, 1999;Parker, 2018, who provides a detailed overview of the relevant literature). Preliminary research in Slovak (Gregová, 2012) indicates that the organization of segments in the structure of the Slovak syllable is not fully in accordance with the principle of sonority sequencing.…”