Publication details

Syllabic consonants in historical Czech and how to identify them

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Authors

ZIKOVÁ Markéta BŘEZINA Martin ČECH Radek KOSEK Pavel

Year of publication 2023
Type Appeared in Conference without Proceedings
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
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. 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)#.
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