Progressively less sonorous segments are assigned to progressively more marginal positions, moving out from the nucleus. According to the SSP, the most sonorous segment of a syllable is assigned to the nucleus position. Since the SSP was proposed, it has played a central role in phonological theory for its ability to account for the distribution of segments in the syllable, and relatedly to motivate phonological alternations that repair structures which otherwise would violate it ( Blevins 1995 Clements 1990 Hooper 1972 Jespersen 1904/1913 McCarthy 2008 Parker 2002, 2008 Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004 Selkirk 1982, 1984 Sievers 1876 Smolensky 2006 Steriade 1982, 2002 Vennemann 1972, 19, 2007). The paper contains background in Section 2, materials and methods in Section 3, results in Section 4, discussion in Section 5 and conclusions in Section 6. Overall, we find that a significant proportion of languages (around two fifths to one half depending on assumptions made about complex segments) possess clusters that violate the SSP, that violations are due to a range of segment types, and that violations in onsets and codas are not symmetrical.
When we examine clusters, we adopt alternative analyses of complex segments ( Round 2017b), to assess how findings about the SSP may depend upon assumptions about segmentation. By examining evidence for the SSP in a large cross-linguistic dataset, we aim to clarify the empirical status of the SSP – an essential step towards a more complete and theoretically satisfactory understanding of this fundamental principle of syllable structure ( Clements 1990 Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004). In this paper, we re-visit the SSP in a study of nearly five hundred languages. However, the SSP has been challenged by persistent disagreement over its definition, and a growing inventory of counterexamples reported from lesser-studied languages. We discuss where existing theoretical accounts of the SSP require further development to account for our crosslinguistic results.Įver since Sievers (1876) related the relative loudness of segments to their permitted linear arrangements within syllables and formulated this relation as the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), the SSP has been a major explanatory tool in phonology. Violations in onsets and codas are not symmetrical, especially when complex segments are treated as units. We examine which clusters cause the violations, and find a wide range: not only the notorious case of clusters with sibilants, but also with nasals, approximants and other obstruents.
We find a significant proportion of languages violate the SSP: almost one half of the language sample. We consider the treatment of complex segments both as sonority units and as clusters. We adopt a phonetically-grounded definition of sonority – acoustic intensity – and examine how many languages contain SSP-violating clusters word-initially and word-finally. This study aims to clarify the empirical status of the SSP in a cross-linguistic study of 496 languages. The Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) is a fundamental governing principle of syllable structure however, its details remain contested.
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