Syllabic Consonants in Historical Czech and How to Identify Them.
- Resource Type
- Article
- Authors
- Ziková, Markéta; Březina, Martin; Čech, Radek; Kosek, Pavel
- Source
- Jazykovedný Casopis. Jun2023, Vol. 74 Issue 1, p391-400. 10p.
- Subject
- *CONSONANTS
- Language
- ISSN
- 0021-5597
The paper provides fine-grained evidence concerning the development of syllabic consonants /r l/ in Czech, that is only sketched in the existing literature. The evidence is based on an automatic parser that identifies potential syllable-projecting segments according to sonority. The parser was applied to six verse texts from the 14th–16th centuries, which show a strong tendency towards octosyllabicity. The data provided by the parser newly reveal that the shift from non-syllabic to syllabic /r l/ is position-dependent: word-medial non-syllabic strings C(r/l)C change more rapidly than non-syllabic word-final ones C(r/l)#. This finding is in line with a cross-linguistic observation that non-syllabic C(r/l)C are marked, hence they are regularly syllabified prior to less marked C(r/l)#. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]