Intervokaliniai priebalsiai: vienanarės ir dvinarės grupės
Intervocalic Consonants: Monomial and Binomial Groups

Summary/Abstract: A comprehensive description of general syntagmatic links of Lithuanian consonants is supplied by A. Girdenis. Considerable amount of material, concerning the structure of phonemic syllables and roots of verbs and nominal words is also found. This paper concentrates on the simplest intervocalic segments: isolated consonants and their binomial clusters. They cover the biggest part of all intervocalic consonant combinations (96%). The goal of the research is to determine which combinations of particular consonants really exist in the Lithuanian language. The analyzed data comprises 85 millions words from VDU Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian language. The results show that in Lithuanian commonly one consonant is usually used between two vowels. Such consonants make up 75% of all the intervocalic segments. This signifies an obvious tendency to CV type syllables in the Lithuanian language. Binomial combinations of consonants form almost a fifth part of all the intervocalic consonant groups. The corpus displayed examples of all possible nine combinations of binomial consonants. Three of them – ST, TR, SR – can be either the beginning of phonological syllable, or they can belong to the same syllable. The boundary of the syllable in other binomial consonant combinations would be after the first member of a cluster: R-T, T-T, R-R, R-S, T-S, S-S. The results presented in this paper are relevant not only for linguists. They have practical value both for speech therapists and language technology specialists.

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