Syllabotactics

Syllabotactics was introduced to the domain of phonology by S. Morteza Alamolhoda in World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies, September 8-13 2002, in the University of Mainz, Germany in a paper titled  'Syllabostatistics and Syllabotactics of the Word in Modern Persian'. That paper was later published in Rask: Internationalt tidsskrift for sprog og kommunikation (Odense, No 19, October 2003, 87-106) titled 'A preliminary research on the syllabotactics of the Word in Modern Persian'.

Alamolhoda defines Syllabotactics as the study of the constraints on the combinatory possibilities of syllables, their positions of occurrence and possible order in the word. While phonotactics aims to explore how well-formed the syllables of a language are, syllabotactics aims to examine how well-formed the words of the language under investigation are.

In his article 'A preliminary research on the syllabotactics of the word in modern Persian', Alamolhoda investigates three types of restrictions in the tactic behavior of the syllables in the structure of the words: restriction in membership, restriction in sequence of members and restriction in number of members. All restrictive measures were observed to be forced on structures with more than three syllables. It was noticed that the more complicated the structure of the words, the higher is the number of missing combinations. This implies that from a syllabotactical point of view, Modern Persian favors simpler structures and most preferably those formed of two syllables. The data of the study consists of over 9000 words. It includes words formed of two to six syllables. This research is a valuable contribution to the domain of phonology in general and to the phonology of the Modern Persian in particular. Similar to phonotactics, research in syllabotactics may introduce significant potentials to the development of language technology and especially it can be highly useful in automatic speech and language recognition.