Vietovardžių pradiniai priebalsiai bei jų junginiai
Initial Consonants and their Clusters in Toponyms

Summary/Abstract: The syllable structure of proper names, surnames and toponyms, as well as their general and positional patterns have been subjected to detailed analysis in a number of works (see in Kliukiene, Varatinskaite (2006); Kliukiene (2006; 2007). The initial clusters of consonants dominating the syllable of toponyms, however, have not been considered in these papers. The present investigation is an attempt to fili the gap and describe the initial consonant patterns of the syllable of toponyms. The corpus for the research includes 1638 toponyms from the Dictionary of Stress in Place Names (1994). After the syllabification of toponyms into phonological syllables, 4935 syllables were obtained for the investigation. These data were processed with the computer (Microsoft Word). For further analysis the original software programme SKIEMUO.PAS., createdby Aleksas Girdenis (programming language Turbo Pascal). 7). The programme was used to process syllable clusters in order to determine positional patterns and their productivity. The following conclusions were drawn from the analysis: • In toponyms, all initial consonant clusters pos- sible in the Lithuanian language, namely, ST, TR, SR and STR, can be found; • The most productive is the syllable with a monomial plosive initial, TV; • Binomial and trinomial initial clusters are to be regarded marginal, because their frequency of occurrence is very low.

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