The feature-economy principle is one of the key theoretical notions which have been postulated to account for the structure of phoneme inventories in the world's languages. In this paper, we test the explanatory power of this principle by conducting a study of the co-occurrence of consonant segments in phonological inventories, based on a sample of 2761 languages. We show that the feature-economy principle is able to account for many important patterns in the structure of the world's phonological inventories; however, there are particular classes of sounds, such as what we term the ‘basic consonant inventory’ (the core cluster of segments found in the majority of the world's languages), as well as several more peripheral clusters whose organisation follows different principles.

中文翻译：

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辅音共现类和特征经济原理

特征经济原理是被假设用来解释世界语言中音素清单结构的关键理论概念之一。在本文中，我们基于 2761 种语言的样本，通过研究语音清单中辅音片段的共现来测试该原理的解释能力。我们表明，特征经济原则能够解释世界语音目录结构中的许多重要模式；然而，也有特定类别的声音，例如我们所说的“基本辅音清单”（世界上大多数语言中发现的核心音段集群），以及更多的外围集群，其组织遵循不同的原则。