Comparing Fricative and Stop Consonants in the Cluster with Their Sequence at the Boundary of Compounding based on the Place of Articulation and Articulators

One of the important issues in the phonotactics of Farsi vocabulary is how to put phonemes together and produce words with light and heavy syllables. The purpose of this study is to compare the fricative and stop sequences at the boundary of compounding in the compound and derivative-compound words with their clusters in simplex vocabulary. What are the differences between fricative and stop consonants in the cluster and sequence as for the place of articulation and articulators? In order to answer this question, 15446 compound and derivative-compound words and 14336 simplex words have been collected from Farsi dictionaries and the phonological information related to each word is examined. The results of data analysis indicates that: a) the total frequency of cluster with two articulators is about 5.25 times higher than with one articulator in clusters in simplex words, and at the compounding boundary, the total frequency with two articulator sequences is about 2.88 times higher than with one articulator; b) two-stop clusters are only heterorganic and two-stop sequences are of two types: heterorganic and contiguous; c) only in the fricative-stop clusters there are three kinds of, homorganic, heterorganic and contiguous clusters; in contrast, in three groups of sequences, all of these types of the heterorganic, homorganic and contiguous sequences are seen; d) as the number of other places of articulation increases between two members of the heterorganic cluster, the frequency of cluster production decreases. Such a decrease in frequency is seen only in two-stop and fricative-stop heterorganic sequences.