LSSlaL 23: The Phonology of Stress in Polish

The Phonology of Stress in Polish

Iwona Kraska-Szlenk
University of Warsaw

This book examines the Polish stress system within the theoretical framework of Optimality Theory (OT). Two aspects of stress, its position and its relative prominence, are discussed in a broader context of domain structuring in Polish. General theoretical questions are also addressed, e.g. the formal treatment of clitics, lexical exceptions, analogy.

The introductory chapter one outlines the principles of OT and the basic facts of Polish morphology and syllabification relevant to stress. Chapter two presents a discussion of a general foot pattern within a domain of the word, including compounds, lexical exceptions and acronyms. The most elaborated chapter three is devoted to an intricate problem of stress patterns in clitic groups. A complex interaction between the position of metrical feet, syllabification and sandhi effects (final devoicing, voicing assimilations) necessitates a novel approach to the issue of prosodic domains in Polish, which are assumed to be constraint-based. Peculiar behavior of some clitics argues for their preferable unstressability which may be, however, violated under a higher demand. The foot pattern in proclitic groups calls for a recourse to analogy for which an OT analysis is given (additionally motivated by examples of paradigmatic leveling and reduplication).

In the final chapter four a grid representation is used to reflect relative differences between primary, secondary and subsidiary stresses. A four-way stress contrasts attested for Polish phrases are predicted by a grid-building family of constraints which coexists with a foot-building family of constraints dicussed in the previous chapters. The Polish data are examined in detail, but some comparison to other languages is also made in order to argue for the universal character of grid constraints.

ISBN 9783895867255. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 23. 120pp. 2003.