Quantitative analysis of the syllable in the Czech lexicon

Vol.63,No.2(2015)

Aleš Bičan

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/134492

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Abstract
The paper provides a quantitative analysis of the syllable in contemporary Czech in a corpus of 146,703 syllables contained in Czech words recorded in Slovník spisovné češtiny. After discussing the general structure of the Czech syllable and constraints on its structure (in terms of the allowed number of non-vocalic phonemes within a syllable), it examines the distribution of syllabic types according to the type of syllabic nucleus and according to different parts of speech. It shows that the most common are open syllables and syllables beginning with a single consonant. In total, the most favored syllabic type is CV. These tendencies hold for all syllabic nuclei except for the diphthongal vowels, but here we assume the influence of the chosen data (no inflected forms of words are includ-ed) rather than that it would be a special characteristic of this vowel class. All parts of speech show the same preferences, and there are only minor differences between them. However, it has been found out that pronouns and uninflectable words have a less complex syllabic structure than the other parts of speech. A partial comparison with other samples of the Czech vocabulary is offered, too.

Keywords:
phonotactics; syllable; phonological corpus; lexical corpus; syllabic consonants; parts of speech

Pages:
87–107
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