The Sonority Sequencing Principle in Historical Czech: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

This paper investigates the application of the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) in historical Czech through a corpus-based approach. Drawing on texts from the 14th and 17th centuries, we examine the structure of word-initial and word-final consonant clusters with respect to both the strict and mild versions of the SSP. The results reveal two frequent types of violations: those involving liquids—specific to the diachronic development of Czech—and those involving sibilants, which are common crosslinguistically. Our findings provide new empirical evidence for the study of historical phonotactics in Slavic languages.