The phonotactics of syllabic liquids in Czech words of foreign origin

Abstract

Summary The paper describes and analyzes the occurrence and combinability of Czech syllabic liquids in words of foreign origin in order to find out whether and how they differ from native Czech words. The comparison relies on the material taken from the Phonological Corpus of Czech. The phonotactics of the native words is treated as the primary system that has been enriched by phonological properties of the loanwords. It is shown that the loanwords have extended the range of the occurrence of the syllabic liquids as well as the range of combinations of a consonant plus a syllabic liquid. Most of the newly imported combinations are instantiations of latently possible phonotactic patterns, but there are some genuine innovations with a potential to reshape the native phonotactics. Special attention is paid to English loanwords because they contain most of the phonotactic peculiarities.