The Sonority Sequencing Principle in Historical Czech: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract This paper investigates the application of the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) in historical Czech through a corpus-based approach. Drawing on texts from the 14 th and 17 th centuries, we examine the structure of word-initial and word-final consonant clusters with respect to both the strict and mild versions of the SSP. The results reveal two frequent types of violations: those involving liquids—specific to the diachronic development of Czech—and those involving sibilants, which are common cross-linguistically. Our findings provide new empirical evidence for the study of historical phonotactics in Slavic languages.