Consonant co-occurrence restrictions in Modern Hebrew

Abstract

Abstract The paper presents consonant co-occurrence restrictions in Hebrew, focusing on the influence of the similarity factor. A lexical analysis of Hebrew verbs reveals tendency to avoid similar, close consonants, by showing a highly significant correlation (p<0.0001) between co-occurrence of C1-C2 sequences in the lexicon and similarity factors (based on Frisch et al.’s 2004 model for similarity, adjusted to Hebrew). In other words, the more two consonants are similar to each other, the smaller their chances are to co-occur as C1-C2 in a Hebrew verb. In addition, a major role of place of articulation is observed, such that consonants that share major place of articulation are less likely to co-occur. However, the highly significant correlation between co-occurrences and similarity factors suggests that not only major place of articulation affects the restrictions; otherwise we would wrongly predict no effect in non-homorganic pairs.