From lexical to syllabic organization: Favored and disfavored co-occurrences

International audienceThis paper deals with the organization of the syllable in natural languages. As a first attempt to understand selection and restriction constraints in syllable structure, we analyzed 14 languages. First, we present some implicational laws connected to the frequencies of syllable types and based on the complexity of onset and coda. Then we tested the relations between segments that appear in the same syllable, or in onset of two consecutive syllables. If we hypothesize that the most frequent syllable types are the most functional ones, searching for a syllabic "architecture" based on C-V co-occurrences may help us explain syllable-structure frames