Talk:Phonotactics

No onset /ŋ/ or /ʒ/?

What about pleasure and azure? Those are the classic examples of /ʒ/ and both have syllables that begin with /ʒ/. 63.247.160.139 (talk) 23:10, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Maybe. Many phonologists believe that the /ʒ/ in those words is in the coda of the first syllable rather than the onset of the second. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:01, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Who? Who are these "many phonologists" you refer to? The requirement for a syllable onset is the universally unmarked state, whereas syllables with codas are universally more marked than codaless ones - so much so that English entirely lacks onsetless syllables - any syllable that otherwise begin with a vowel has an epenthetic glottal stop inserted to satisfy the onset requirement (if you're a native speaker, just try it out for yourself: say the word "any" and you'll feel it, and if you still don't believe me, record yourself speaking and plot it out in PRAAT or similar software and you'll see the acoustic "bump" in the waveform where the glottis closed and reopened). Using your logic, pleasure and azure should be pronounced 'plɛʒ.ʔɚ and æʒ.ʔɚ (sorry if the IPA isn't rendered properly by the browser). Quite literally the only counterexample I can think of is Breen's analysis of Arrernte, and that's hardly an uncontroversial subject in and of itself. 79.176.36.183 (talk) 09:52, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

Even if that were accepted, it would be hard to account for a word like <genre>. 2001:18E8:2:11B5:F000:0:0:81B (talk) 06:15, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

No onset /ŋ/ is English one of the main difficulties for English speakers learning the Māori_language. Māori does have onset /ŋ/,, e.g. ngā /ŋā/ = the (plural definite article). Nick Mulgan (talk) 02:26, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Theoretically permissible/foreign vs. outright impermissible?

There seem to be two basic kinds of phonotactic constraints:

• Sounds that do not occur in the language, but that native speakers have little trouble articulating when pressed, and that are readily pronounced if imported as a foreign word (e.g., English borrowings Tlingit, sphere, Sbarro). An ending cluster such as "lzh" doesn't occur in English, and is forbidden by most lists of English phonotactics, but a native Anglophone could and probably would pronounce it if it formed part of a foreign loanword (**"dalzh," etc.).
• Sounds that native speakers cannot pronounce, or can pronounce only with great difficulty. In this latter case, native speakers substitute for the sound (vowel insertion, metathesis, etc.) or simplify it (e.g., /kn/ > /n/) if obliged to say the word. For this sort of phonotactic constraint, consider the initial clusters in foreign words such as xylem and Tbilisi.

Point is, these two sorts of phonotactic constraint seem fundamentally different in ways that should be basic to any discussion of phonotactics, and phonotactic investigations that ignore that distinction seem fundamentally wrongfooted. Do the major academic sources bear this out? And if not, why not?

Re: 14 Constraints on English Phonotactics

The current list is very consonant-heavy, and as the above sections have elucidated, seems mostly appropriate for monosyllabic words. The situation is much more complex for multisyllabic words, but there are a few very obvious phonotactic constraints missing from this list (which was cited correctly, so it is a problem more with the original source). Here are a few additions:

• No /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /ʊ/, or /æ/ in a word-final open syllable or before a vowel-initial syllable (/kænədʌ/ is fine but not /kæ/)
• No more than two unreduced vowels in a row within a word

Separately, at least the homorganic nasal constraint needs to be specified much more to account for compound nouns. It seems like not a particularly troublesome phonotactic constraint. See, for example, words like "kingpin" or "gangplank," which are not realized as *[gæ̃mplæ̃ŋk]. 2001:18E8:2:11B5:F000:0:0:81B (talk) 06:30, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Syllable margins?

This term is used without explanation. A reasonable guess would be that a "margin" is anything on the edges of the syllable, therefore either an onset or a coda, but never a nucleus. But readers shouldn't need to guess at our meaning. Please define or explain the term if it's worth keeping in the article. BTW, the relevant "main article" is that on the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) – which doesn't use the term "margin" at all. yoyo (talk) 13:21, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Removed section

I would like to point out that this edit by 222.153.243.25 has removed an entire section, without any explanation. --Pegasovagante (talk) 15:27, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Examples Needed

When listing consonant formations, examples of words that include those formations aren't just helpful, they're practically mandatory.2600:1702:3940:92D0:BD67:4531:9ABF:CA1D (talk) 08:14, 22 June 2019 (UTC)