¹ Hans Vogt, Phoneme classes and phoneme classification, Word 10.29 (1954). See also Einar Haugen, The syllable in linguistic description, For Roman Jakobson 213–21 (The Hague, 1956); Syllabification in Kutenai, IJAL 22.196–201 (1956); Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, On the definition of phoneme categories on a distributional basis, Acta linguistica 7.8–39 (1952); Charles F. Hockett, Manual of phonology 51–64 (Indiana University publications in anthropology and linguistics, Memoir 11; 1955). The terms ‘onset’, ‘interlude’, and ‘coda’ are taken from Hockett's work. A sequence is to be understood as any number of consonants including zero. Thus, the intervocalic /-br-/ in abrigo ‘overcoat’ is considered a combination of a final zero plus an initial /br/.

This study was aided by National Science Foundation Grant G2502.

² It does not affect the main thesis of this paper that these clusters are usually restricted to the style referred to by Tomás Navarro Tomás as ‘culta’, Manual de pronunciación española ⁶ 102 et passim (Madrid, 1950). It is, however, worth noting that the effect of ‘rapid speech’ is in general to simplify nondissolvable clusters to dissolvable ones. See also the discussion by Emilio Alarcos Llorach, Fonología española ² 166 (Madrid, 1954).

³ Hans Vogt, Language contacts, Word 10.371 fn. 12, points out the danger of circularity: ‘In order to describe one system the linguist will have to single out what in the speech events belong[s] to that one system, and disregard the other elements, but in order to be able to do so, he must know the system.‘

⁴ The data presented here are based essentially on the examples cited by Alarcos Llorach 159–67, although our interpretation of the phonetic facts is slightly different.

⁵ These terms are suggested by Vogt, Word 10.33. We modify his use of the terms, and further restrict them below.

⁶ For a discussion of the bases for such typologies, see Rulon Wells, Archiving and language typology, IJAL 20.101–7 (1954).

⁷ The text consists of a transcription of a passage selected at random from a modern Spanish novel.

Clusters across word boundaries are excluded, though from a purely phonological point of view they do not seem to differ from clusters within the word. For the position that Spanish has internal open juncture, see the article by Stockwell, Bowen, and Silva-Fuenzalida, Lg. 32.641–65 (1956). Nearly all dissolvable clusters, whether they occur internally or not, occur across word boundaries; an example is /-xb-/ in reloj bueno ‘good watch’.

⁸ A similar count of the frequencies of -CCC- was inconclusive because of the low frequencies of sequences of three or more consonants.

⁹ See Fischer-Jørgensen 32.

¹⁰ There is also the possibility of discussing the dissolvability of sequences in terms of phoneme classes instead of the particular phonemes, as mentioned by Fischer-Jørgensen 18. Thus, /-mp-/ is not dissolvable into /-m/ and /p-/, since /-m/ does not occur. But other sequences of nasal plus stop, such as /-nt-/, are dissolvable. An analysis in terms of classes would reduce the number of nondissolvable sequences.

¹¹ The new codas may be -CC instead of -C. The loanword vals /bals/ ‘waltz’ renders the /-rsp-/ in perspectiva dissolvable into /-rs/ and /p-/, assuming an analysis based on classes; see fn. 10.