The phonology of the Proto-Indo-European root structure constraints

Abstract

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots are usually reconstructed as overwhelmingly CVC for the earliest stages. PIE is also considered to have systematically prohibited three of the nine logically possible laryngeal manner combinations among its Stop-V-Stop roots: plain voiced stops could not co-occur, nor could either order of voiced aspirates with voiceless stops. A seldom reported further observation, however, is that all Stop-V-Stop roots were very rare in PIE, representing, we calculate, only 3.5% of Pokorny's (1959) lexicon of better than 2000 entries. Irrespective of the initial consonant, the distribution of root-finals was very limited, too, as only 14% of reconstructed roots are stop-final. We interpret this pattern in terms of the cross-linguistic tendency toward final ‘opening of articulation’, such that those features are preferentially licensed to occur in the termination of the root syllable which results in more rather than less sonority. We conclude that the traditional PIE Root Structure Constraints, which have played a pivotal role throughout modern IE studies (including the current debate about the Glottalic Theory), are simply misformulated, and that their effects derive instead from more general considerations of phonological structure and markedness.