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Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek phōnḗ "voice, sound" and taktikós "having to do with arranging")[1] is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters, and vowel sequences by means of phonotactical constraints.
Phonotactic constraints are highly language specific. For example, in Japanese, consonant clusters like /st/ do not occur. Similarly, the sounds /kn/ and /ɡn/ are not permitted at the beginning of a word in Modern English but are in German and Dutch, and were permitted in Old and Middle English. In contrast, in some Slavic languages /l/ and /r/ are used as vowels and many words do not contain the English equivalent of vowels.
Syllables have the following internal segmental structure:
Both onset and coda may be empty, forming a vowel-only syllable, or alternatively, the nucleus can be occupied by a syllabic consonant. Phonotactics is known to affect second language vocabulary acquisition.[2]
The English syllable (and word) twelfths /twɛlfθs/ is divided into the onset /tw/, the nucleus /ɛ/, and the coda /lfθs/, and it can thus be described as CCVCCCC (C = consonant, V = vowel). On this basis it is possible to form rules for which representations of phoneme classes may fill the cluster. For instance, English allows at most three consonants in an onset, but among native words under standard accents (and excluding a few obscure learned words such as sphragistics), phonemes in a three-consonantal onset are limited to the following scheme:[3]
This constraint can be observed in the pronunciation of the word blue: originally, the vowel of blue was identical to the vowel of cue, approximately [iw]. In most dialects of English, [iw] shifted to [juː]. Theoretically, this would produce **[bljuː]. The cluster [blj], however, infringes the constraint for three-consonantal onsets in English. Therefore, the pronunciation has been reduced to [bluː] by elision of the [j].
Not all languages have this constraint: compare Spanish pliegue [ˈpljeɣe] or French pluie [plɥi].
In English, there exist fourteen constraints on phonotactics:[4]
In general, the rules of phonotactics operate around the sonority hierarchy, stipulating that the nucleus has maximal sonority and that sonority decreases as you move away from the nucleus. The voiceless alveolar fricative [s] is lower on the sonority hierarchy than the alveolar lateral approximant [l], so the combination /sl/ is permitted in onsets and /ls/ is permitted in codas, but /ls/ is not allowed in onsets and /sl/ is not allowed in codas. Hence slips /slɪps/ and pulse /pʌls/ are possible English words while *lsips and *pusl are not.
That said, in some cases /s/ is "invisible" to the sonority hierarchy; as a fricative, it is more sonorant than the plosive /t/. However, combinations like [stiːɫ] (steal), which violates the sonority hierarchy, are seen and are even common in English. This same property is seen in many other languages for either /s/ or /z/ and is thus a human universal.