Syllable Contact

Abstract

Syllable contact is a notion introduced to describe the sonority relation between adjacent segments across a syllable boundary, that is, between heterosyllabic coda and onset segments. According to Hooper (1976), Murray and Vennemann (1983), and Vennemann (1988), among others, there is a cross‐linguistic preference to avoid rising sonority across a syllable boundary; this tendency is formulated as the Syllable Contact Law (SCL). This law states, for example, that al.ta , with falling sonority, is preferred to at.la , with rising sonority. This law has been adduced to account for both diachronic and synchronic sound alternations in coda—onset clusters.

Coronal codas and phonotactics in Tupi-Guarani languages

“…17 That is, there are no diphthongs (in the sense of section Introduction) in these languages. In addition to this, I argue that PTG phonotactics was subject to a syllable contact constraint, for which the formulation ( 11) is accepted here, and that this explains a series of disparate patterns to be considered below (see SEO, 2011 for discussion of the phenomena that motivated the recognition of syllable contact constraints and for extensive literature on the matter).…”