Similar Place Avoidance in Slavic and other Indo-European languages

Abstract

The paper discusses a constraint on the distribution of homorganic CVC sequences known as Similar Place Avoidance (SPA). Though proposed as a statistical universal, it has been little considered in Slavic and other Indo-European languages. We evaluate the CVC distribution in 100 recorded and reconstructed varieties, of which 18 are Slavic, 44 are non-Slavic Indo-European, and 38 are non-Indo-European. The SPA principle has been formulated as pertaining to CVC sequences of two consonants sharing the same place, but it has also been suggested that coronals are dependent on sonorancy agreement for the constraint to take effect. This dependency is indeed observable but concerns dento-alveolars only, not coronals as a whole class. SPA weakly restricts combinations of dento-alveolar sonorants with palatal sonorants. Combinations of different-place coronal obstruents are disfavored, but this is instead due to sibilancy avoidance (a restriction of the co-occurrence of two sibilants in a CVC sequence, previously unreported). Finally, combinations of palatals (including post-alveolars) are less often subject to an SPA effect, and the Slavic languages virtually lack this kind of restriction.