Patterns of English Consonant Clusters in E. M. Forster’s ‘‘The Road From Colonus’’

A consonant cluster (henceforth CC) is a combination of two or more consonants without a vowel between them. There can be initial, medial and final CCs. Additionally, there are initial CCs with medial or final ones, and medial CCs with final ones. To the best knowledge of the researcher, patterns of English consonant clusters in Forster’s ‘The Road from Colonus’’ has not been handled previously.The present study aims at analyzing CCs in such a short story and finding out patterns of such clusters. Those consonant sequences are statistically investigated in order to show their most prominent patterns and their frequency. Accordingly, it can be hypothesised that medial patterns of CCs are more prominent and commonly used than initial and final ones whereas the frequency of final patterns of CCs is higher than that of initial and medial ones. The results of analyzing CCs in the short story under investigation indicate that there are (31) patterns of two and three – initial CCs whose frequency is (335), (79) patterns of two, three and four – final CCs which are repeated (552) times and (122) patterns of two and three– medial CCs whose frequency is (355). Such results lead to the conclusions that medial patterns of CCs are more than initial and final ones but the frequency of the patterns of final CCs exceeds that of initial and medial ones.