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Cross-linguistic trends in the frequency of CV sequences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2008

Tore Janson
Tore Janson*
Affiliation:
University of Gothenburg
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Abstract

The problem discussed is which CV sequences are generally favoured or disfavoured in the languages of the world, and the reasons for the trends. An investigation of relative frequencies of CV combinations in five languages is presented. The main result is that the favoured sequences are those in which there is no great movement of the articulatory organs from the consonant to the vowel. Examples are combinations of a dental consonant and a front vowel, and a velar consonant and a back vowel.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 3 , May 1986 , pp. 179 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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Footnotes

*

My thanks go first to John Ohala for his extensive and insightful comments on a previous version of this paper. Benny Brodda generously helped with the computer analysis. In the evaluation of the phonological systems and their relations to the orthographies of the languages, I was much helped by Birgit Nilsson (for Turkish) and Auskra Reinis (for Latvian).

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