Graduality and closedness in consonantal phonotactics: a perceptually grounded approach

The paper suggests that the phonotactics of languages often displays gradual, non-categorical patterns, in the sense that not all possible combinations are grammatical along the various dimensions of segmental contrast. The graduality of phonotactics is a property that will be shown to be better explained by models that employ perception-based functional principles, such as perception cue licensing according to relative context, and phonotactic closedness. The phonotactic space of a language will be claimed to be defined by hierarchical perceptual difficulty scales that linearly order the various syntagmatic relations a segment can enter into. All existing items (marked as well as unmarked — in the perceptual as well as statistical sense) in the language are accounted for in this model, what is more, their place in the phonotactic space is also predicted. In this model, thus, the notions ‘exceptional’ and ‘accidental gap’ are meaningless. Where exactly a language draws the line between a contrast that it makes use of and those that it does not, is arbitrary, but if a perception-wise marked cluster is used in a language, then our model will predict that all the other clusters that are perceptually better cued will also occur in the language, in accordance with the principle of phonotactic closedness. Phonotactic graduality and closedness will be demonstrated in the consonantal phonotactics of languages that are often referred to as possessing ‘complicated’ phonotactics, Hungarian, English, and Slovak.