Representational Handling of Poznań-Cracow Voicing in Government Phonology

• Authors: Grzegorz Michalski
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article discusses the problem of accounting for Poznań-Cracow voicing in Government Phonology. It is concluded that in order for the process to be handled representationally, Polish words beginning with non-obstruents would need to carry the element {L} as part of the melody at the leftmost skeletal slot. It is explained that although such a move would make a representational analysis of Poznań-Cracow Voicing straightforward, the presence of the element {L} on non-obstruents is against the tenets of the phonological model.The article is organised as follows. Section 1 presents a selection of voice phenomena in Polish. Section 2 introduces the basic concepts of Government Phonology relevant to the analysis. Section 3 summarises Gussmann's (2007) analysis of voice phenomena in Polish. Section 4 discusses the differences between Warsaw Polish and Poznań-Cracow Polish in terms of voice assimilation. Section 5 briefly summarises two earlier analyses of voice phenomena in Polish that account for Poznań-Cracow Voicing, namely Gussmann's (1992) SPE-type analysis of Segment-To-Consonant Spreading, and Rubach's (1996) Lexical Phonology (LP) analysis of Cracow Spread. Section 6 presents theoretical considerations of why these two analyses cannot be mechanically translated into GP theoretical machinery. The section also points to the limitations of Voice Adjustment with respect to Poznań-Cracow Voicing. Section 7 introduces the flawed idea of enriching the left edge of words with the element {L}, and provides an attempt at a representational analysis of Poznań-Cracow Voicing using the enriched representation. Section 8 discusses the limitations of the analysis, and proposes an alternative approach to the issue. Section 9 summarises the most important conclusions.1

Keywords

EN

Polish; Poznań-Cracow Voicing; regressive obstruent voice assimilation; Government Phonology

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 44
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 379-399

Dates

published

2008-09-01

online

2009-01-23

Contributors

author

Grzegorz Michalski

• Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10010-008-0019-6