Syllabic Consonants in Historical Czech and How to Identify Them
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Jazykovedný časopis |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | plný text |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/jazcas-2023-0055 |
| Keywords | syllabic consonants; historical Czech; syllable markedness; automatic sonority parser |
| Description | 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 and how they behave in syllable-counting poetry. The parser was applied to more than 16.000 verses written in 14th–16th centuries, which show a strong tendency towards octosyllabicity. The data provided by the parser newly reveal that the syllabic shift 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 the non-syllabic C(r/l)C are marked, hence they are repaired into syllabic prior to the less marked non-syllabic C(r/l)#. |
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