摘要：The phonemic structure of Lithuanian words has
hardly been studied. The aim of this research is to
identify and define the most common structure patterns
of phonological words in the modern Lithuanian
language. The material for the research comprises
approximately 109.000 words. The texts are transcribed;
potential clitics are attached; during the
identification of word models, consonant assimilation
and degemination were taken into consideration.
On the average, a phonological word is composed
of seven phonemes. Very long words are not typical
of the Lithuanian language. Nearly a half of the
words that were investigated comprise from five
to eight phonemes; three to nine phoneme words
constitute even three quarters of the material, while
longer than nine phoneme words make up less than
one fifth of all words.
In the Lithuanian language, a word usually (78 %)
starts with a consonant and ends with a vowel (62 %).
Only one consonant usually (73 %) occurs between
vowels in the middle of a word, as well as at the beginning
(85 %) and the end (93 %) of a word. Longer
than two consonant combinations are very rare in all
positions (they make up about 2 %).
The variety of structural types of words is vast
(even 2216 models were identified). However, the
core of active vocabulary comprises around one
thousand models of phonetic words; the most common
85 models make up even three quarters of all
studied words. The most frequent models usually
have a simple phonemic structure (a consonant, a
vowel, a consonant, a vowel, etc.).
关键词：word, syllable, phoneme, consonant,
vowel, frequency of occurrence.
