ABSTRACT
Both German and Russian can be characterized as rather consonantal languages with respect to the relative amount of their consonantal inventory, variety and complexity of consonant clusters. The present study compares typological differences between German and Russian morphonotactic and phonotactic triple consonant clusters in both word-initial and word-final positions, i.e. in the periphery of the morphological word. For typological purposes, published evidence from English, Polish, and Slovak is compared in honor of the pioneering work in the area by Katarzyna Dziubalska-Ko?aczyk and her team, especially in terms of NAD and the Beats-and-Binding Model. Our research shows that the major differences include asymmetric distributions of consonant clusters within the word: German is richer word-finally, Russian word-initially. In German, all peripheral morphonotactic consonant clusters are formed directly due to morphological concatenation whilst in Russian there are cases determined by morphology-induced vowel deletion. The differences in cluster inventory are related to the fact that the amount of morphonotactic clusters in Russian is greater due to Russian both being more of a consonantal language and having a richer inflectional and derivational morphology than German. The latter fact explains why the majority of word-initial consonant clusters in Russian is morphonotactic, whereas the lack of German word-initial morphonotactic consonant clusters is due to the absence of monophonemic consonantal prefixes and of morphology-induced word-initial vowel deletion.
