Gradience in Sonority Sequencing: Evidence From German and Russian

This research empirically tests the claim that the sonority sequencing principle (SSP), which dictates that syllables rise in sonority from the edges towards the nucleus, is gradient. This was tested on two languages that vary in their adherence to the SSP, that is, German, which does not allow SSP violations outside of sibilant-initial clusters, and Russian, a language that has more SSP violations. We performed corpus-based lexical statistics to test whether the type frequency (Study 1) and probability of attestedness (Study 2) of word-initial consonant clusters are predicted by sonority difference, that is, the degree by which the consonants in the clusters differed in sonority. In Study 1, we found that in both German and Russian, the higher the sonority difference, the higher the type frequency of a consonant cluster. However, this generalisation only held for non-sibilant-initial clusters. In Study 2, we found that the higher the sonority difference, the higher the probability of a cluster being attested in German and Russian. This finding was also observed for sibilant-initial clusters. Overall, these results provide empirical evidence that the SSP is gradient and can be quantitatively observed even within languages that contain SSP violations. Moreover, our findings highlight the need to consider the special status of sibilant-initial clusters in SSP analyses.